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Dify is an open-source platform for building LLM apps and AI workflows visually. It gives teams a drag-and-drop canvas for chaining LLMs, tools, and APIs into complete AI workflows. Modern AI apps need fresh, structured web data, but most teams don't want to write and maintain Python scrapers. In this article, you'll learn how to build a no‑code Dify workflow and switch to a managed Web Scraping API when basic plugins aren't enough.

An unhandled runtime error crashes a Python program immediately. The try/except is the standard mechanism for handling those failures and keeping the script under control. This guide covers all the exception-handling clauses: try, except, else, finally, and raise, alongside practical guidelines for keeping exception handlers narrow, explicit, and maintainable.

A node-fetch proxy routes your fetch requests through an intermediary server, so the target site sees the proxy's IP instead of yours. It's the standard fix for IP blocks, geo-restrictions, and rate limiting in Node.js scraping. The catch: neither node-fetch nor Node's native fetch supports proxies natively, so you need an external agent library to bridge the gap.

To scrape IMDb data with Python at scale, you work with the 6 data layers IMDb sends to the browser instead of parsing the rendered HTML. IMDb is a Next.js application sitting behind AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) Bot Control, and the data lives in JSON-LD blocks, hydration payloads, and an internal GraphQL endpoint. To reach any of them past IMDb's WAF, you need more than plain requests and a real User-Agent, and the rest of this guide builds the setup that holds up.

Cursor AI is a code-aware IDE that generates, debugs, and refines scraper code through natural language, advancing AI-assisted scraping from concept to production. Building scrapers by hand means dealing with selector breakage, anti-bot walls, and proxy rotation logic that compounds every time a target site changes. This article covers setup, Cursor rules, scraper types, Decodo MCP integration, and project maintenance.

Class names are often the quickest way to target elements when you scrape a page. But in XPath, they are not as simple as they look. Because HTML stores multiple classes inside a single space-separated attribute value, a selector that seems correct can still match the wrong element or miss the right one entirely. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to select elements by class in XPath, when to use exact or partial matching, and how to avoid common class matching pitfalls.

Choosing between urllib3 and Requests is like choosing between a manual and an automatic transmission, except one (Requests) is built into the other (urllib3). The automatic gets you moving in seconds, but the manual gives you control over every shift. Both libraries power web scraping, API calls, and automation, and this article will tell you which belongs in your project.

Smartproxy.org has nothing to do with us. The website impersonates the former name of our company, Smartproxy, which we dropped back in April 2025. Independent research from Proxyway now shows something worse than name confusion. Roughly 38% of Smartproxy.org’s IPs overlap with IPIDEA, the proxy network Google disrupted in January 2026.

Charles Proxy (or simply Charles) is an HTTP debugging proxy that acts as a man-in-the-middle between the computer and the internet, which developers and QA teams use to monitor, inspect, and modify data flow. In web scraping, it allows users to intercept, decrypt, and manipulate network traffic to extract data. This guide covers setup, core features, SSL handling, practical use cases, scraping workflows, troubleshooting, and notable alternatives of Charles Proxy.

If you work with APIs, webhooks, automation scripts, or web scraping, chances are you've needed to send JSON with cURL. cURL is one of the most widely used command line tools for making HTTP requests, and modern APIs almost always rely on JSON payloads. In this guide, you’ll learn how to send JSON with cURL, work with files and authentication, debug requests, and route traffic through proxies when needed.

Cloudflare customers now send more than one billion HTTP 402 "Payment Required" responses on an average day. That figure, mentioned in passing in a recent Cloudflare blog post, signals a real shift. A 20-year convention around free public data is being repriced through pay-per-crawl and AI bot management. And businesses that depend on fresh public data now need to figure out how to react and how to do it fast.

Elixir web scraping solves one of the hardest problems in high-volume data collection: concurrency without thread overhead. The BEAM virtual machine (Erlang's runtime) runs each HTTP request as a lightweight process, not an OS thread, so you can fetch thousands of pages concurrently. If a process crashes, the supervisor restarts it automatically. This guide builds a complete Elixir scraper from scratch, covering static pages, paginated targets, JavaScript-heavy sites, and anti-bot countermeasures.

A scraper that fetches pages one at a time spends most of its time waiting on the network. Asynchronous web scraping in Python (built on asyncio and aiohttp) fixes that by handling many requests at once on a single event loop. This guide walks through building a working async scraper, then covers the proxy, retry, and anti-bot escalation patterns you'll need at scale.

​​HTML structure shifts constantly, but the visible text on a page tends to remain more stable. That stability is what makes text-based selectors useful in web scraping. This guide covers the core functions you need to work with text in XPath: text(), contains(), starts-with(), normalize-space(), and translate(), including where each one breaks and how to combine them to build selectors that survive page updates.

Memorial Day weekend lands on Monday, May 25, 2026, opening one of the most aggressive sales events on the U.S. retail calendar. With more shoppers planning to participate but spending less per trip, the next two weeks will reveal which retailers, categories, and days deliver real savings, and which discounts simply look loud.

If you're building a Playwright scraper and not using Xpath, you're probably leaving your most precise location strategy on the table. Think of the DOM as a tree of nodes, and an XPath expression as the specific zip code to reach any node. In this article, we'll explain XPath fundamentals, how to construct XPath expressions, and how to interact with elements, including real-world examples.

You add a pair of jeans to your cart, get distracted, and close the tab. Ten hours later, an email lands in your inbox with the subject line "Forgot something? Here's 15% off." That email was scheduled for you, on a timer someone set 18 months ago, and every retail category has its own version of it.

I lead product marketing at Decodo, where we tracked 1.5K products across 120 retailers in 40+ countries throughout 2025, and here’s what we found about cart abandonment discounts.

Every JSON payload a JavaScript app receives passes through JSON.parse(). The method has to handle malformed payloads, lossy type round-trips, files that exceed Node's default heap, and APIs that change shape without warning. Each of those failures surfaces at parse time. This guide covers them all, including practical patterns for web scraping.