Data Collection

The process of data collection is vital in all kinds of industries. It helps businesses learn about the market, know their customers better and adapt to their needs. Data collection can be automated by scraping a set target. It’s extra useful for analyzing business competition, records, trends, and other data.

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DATA COLLECTION

PARSING

XPath Using Text: How to Select Elements by Text Value

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.

Lukas Mikelionis

Last updated: May 15, 2026

10 min read

NEW

DATA COLLECTION

PYTHON

Playwright XPath: How to Locate and Interact With Elements

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.

Vilius Sakutis

Last updated: May 13, 2026

20 min read

NEW

DATA COLLECTION

JSON.parse() in JavaScript: A Complete Guide

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.

Mykolas Juodis

Last updated: May 12, 2026

8 min read

DATA COLLECTION

Puppeteer vs. Selenium: Which Tool Should You Use for Web Scraping?

Puppeteer and Selenium are the 2 most-used browser automation tools for scraping JavaScript-heavy pages. Comparing puppeteer vs selenium for web scraping isn't just about speed. Browser support, language support, and anti-bot handling all play a role. This guide covers what each tool does well, what it doesn't, and how to pick the right one.

Mykolas Juodis

Last updated: May 07, 2026

12 min read

DATA COLLECTION

HIDE IP

What Is a Mobile Proxy? How It Works, Uses, and When to Use One

A mobile proxy is an intermediary that routes your traffic through a cellular network. This alone sets them apart from other proxy types in terms of anti-detection, geo-targeting granularity, and content exclusivity. This guide will cover how mobile proxies work under the hood, how they stack up against residential, ISP, and datacenter alternatives, and how you can configure one for yourself.

Robertas Lisickis

Last updated: May 07, 2026

10 min read

DATA COLLECTION

jQuery Web Scraping: How To Extract Data From Web Pages

Most developers already know jQuery for DOM manipulation – it's been the default "make the page do things" library for over a decade. So when you need to scrape some data from a web page, reaching for $('.price').text() feels instinctive. The catch is that jQuery web scraping works differently depending on where you run it. In the browser, CORS will shut you down fast. In Node.js, you need a simulated DOM before jQuery even loads. This guide covers both paths – selectors, $.get(), pagination, server-side setup with jsdom, and when to ditch jQuery for something built for the job.

Zilvinas Tamulis

Last updated: May 07, 2026

12 min read

DATA COLLECTION

How to Send Basic Auth Credentials Using cURL

cURL Basic Auth takes 30 seconds until the password has a $ in it, or a colon, or the server keeps returning 401. This guide covers every syntax variation, how to build the Authorization header manually, handling special characters, keeping credentials out of shell history and CI/CD scripts, and when Basic Auth is the wrong tool entirely.

Vilius Sakutis

Last updated: May 05, 2026

11 min read

DATA COLLECTION

How to Scrape Websites with PowerShell: A Complete Guide

PowerShell is already where many Windows admins, DevOps teams, and automation-minded developers handle repetitive work. That makes web scraping a natural next step when you need product prices, uptime signals, public data for reports, or quick checks from the terminal. PowerShell works well here because output is pipeable, objects are native, and CSV and JSON exports are built in. In this guide, you'll build a scraper that fetches pages, parses HTML, handles pagination and errors, uses proxies when needed, and exports structured data.

Justinas Tamasevicius

Last updated: May 04, 2026

12 min read

DATA COLLECTION

PYTHON

Top Python Scraping Libraries: Overview, Comparison, and How to Choose the Right One

Python has the richest scraping ecosystem of any language. That breadth is exactly why making a choice is harder than it should be. This article continues from our Python web scraping guide, focusing on the selection problem: 8 libraries across 4 categories, what each one does best, where it breaks down, and how to choose the right one for the job.

Vilius Sakutis

Last updated: Apr 30, 2026

20 min read

DATA COLLECTION

BUSINESS AUTOMATION

How To Use ScrapeGraph AI for Web Scraping in 2026

Web scraping used to mean extracting data with CSS selectors, and then rebuilding your scraper every time a target changes its layout. Here's the good news: ScrapeGraph AI takes a new approach as it uses LLMs to extract data from websites based on meaning, so you can describe what you need in natural language while the library handles the rest for you. In this guide, you'll learn how ScrapeGraph AI works and how to configure it to export structured datasets in the right formats. The tools we'll use are Python, ScrapeGraph AI, and Decodo proxies.

Kipras Kalzanauskas

Last updated: Apr 30, 2026

20 min read

DATA COLLECTION

PARSING

Golang Headless Browser: Complete chromedp Tutorial

A plain Go HTTP client only sees the HTML the server returns. That's enough for static pages. It breaks down when JavaScript renders the real content later, which is common on SPAs, infinite-scroll interfaces, and login-protected flows. chromedp solves that by driving Chrome or Chromium through the Chrome DevTools Protocol, or CDP, without a separate WebDriver layer. In this tutorial, you’ll set up chromedp, extract dynamic content, interact with pages, route traffic through proxies, run Chrome in Docker, and scale scraping with goroutines.

Justinas Tamasevicius

Last updated: Apr 30, 2026

16 min read

DATA COLLECTION

Java Web Scraping Libraries: How to Choose and Use the Best Tools for Your Project

Java is a battle-tested choice for web scraping at scale due to its robust type safety, structured concurrency, safe multithreading, and a mature ecosystem. However, its advantage is also a major pain point: having too many libraries. From jsoup and HtmlUnit to Selenium and Playwright, these libraries exist to simplify web scraping, and yet picking "the right one" is a challenge. This guide will teach you how to choose the right tool based on your project requirements and how to handle modern scraping challenges.

Vilius Sakutis

Last updated: Apr 30, 2026

17 min read

PYTHON

DATA COLLECTION

Wait for Page to Load in Beautiful Soup: Why It Fails and How to Fix It

Waiting for a page to load when using Beautiful Soup is a common challenge in web scraping, especially when your scraper returns empty results because the page renders content via JavaScript. This happens because Beautiful Soup is a parser, not a browser, so it can’t execute JavaScript or wait for dynamic content to load. To handle this, you can use browser automation tools like Selenium or Playwright, a lightweight option like requests-html, or a Web Scraping API for production-grade workflows.

Lukas Mikelionis

Last updated: Apr 30, 2026

9 min read

DATA COLLECTION

BUSINESS AUTOMATION

Puppeteer vs. Playwright: Which Tool Is Better for Web Scraping?

Puppeteer vs. Playwright is a real architectural decision for any production scraping project. The two libraries share a common origin: Playwright was built at Microsoft by engineers who previously worked on Puppeteer at Google. Yet they're different on browser coverage, language bindings, and scraping ergonomics. Performance, stealth, proxy integration, and parallel execution decide which tool fits your pipeline.

Justinas Tamasevicius

Last updated: Apr 24, 2026

8 min read

DATA COLLECTION

Apache Nutch Tutorial: Install, Crawl, Index, and Automate

Scraping a page is simple. Crawling an entire website repeatedly, at scale, while also producing structured data that you can query, can be complex. Most scraping tools aren't designed for it, and that's what Apache Nutch is developed for. Nutch is an open source web crawler with built-in robots.txt compliance and native Apache Solr integration. By the end of this guide, you'll have a scoped crawl pipeline running and your data indexed into Solr.

Lukas Mikelionis

Last updated: Apr 24, 2026

15 min read

DATA COLLECTION

PYTHON

How to Use a Cloudflare Scraper for Data Extraction

Cloudflare protects over 20% of all websites, and its anti-bot system can shut your scraper down in seconds. A Cloudflare scraper is any tool or script that gets past those defenses to pull data from protected sites. This guide breaks down how Cloudflare spots bots, why most scrapers fail, and how to scrape with Decodo's Web Scraping API.

Mykolas Juodis

Last updated: Apr 23, 2026

7 min read

DATA COLLECTION

Web Scraping Without Getting Blocked: A Practical Guide for 2026

Web scraping without getting blocked is one of the hardest challenges you might face. Whether you’re a business conducting market research or a solopreneur working on your next big thing, most scrapers fail not because the code is wrong, but because websites now run layered detection that flags bots before a single byte of HTML is returned. This guide breaks down all the detection layers, including network, TLS, browser, and behavioral, and delivers the best techniques on how to overcome each.

Benediktas Kazlauskas

Last updated: Apr 23, 2026

12 min read

PYTHON

DATA COLLECTION

Wait for Page to Load in Playwright: A Practical Guide to Every Waiting Method

Modern web apps don’t load everything at once, so running scripts too early leads to missed data, broken actions, and flaky results. In this guide, you'll learn how to handle waiting in Playwright, including how it behaves in a headless browser environment, covering auto-waiting, selectors, network events, timeouts, custom conditions, and error handling across dynamic pages.

Dominykas Niaura

Last updated: Apr 23, 2026

6 min read