How to extract the JSON data?

Is Octoparse worth it?

Octoparse is by far one of the most effective and reliable applications for finding Wi-Fi networks around the world.

Whether you're on a plane, train, or even walking through a big city, it's possible to find free Wi-Fi with Octoparse.

In this tutorial, we'll take an in-depth look at the most powerful feature of Octoparse: the ability to predict your next "hot spot" or available Wi-Fi network. So what is Octoparse? Octoparse is a free application that runs on Windows and Mac computers (it's available on all modern mobile devices too). If you find that your Wi-Fi connection has been dropped during a flight or on a train ride, you can use Octoparse to find the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot or simply get online again in a matter of seconds.

With over 400 million users in 200 countries, Octoparse is by far one of the most reliable applications available for finding a Wi-Fi hotspot near you. The app detects all nearby hotspots and connects to them automatically without any registration or sign-in required. You can also download the data on any of the other 300 million Wi-Fi hotspots in the world directly from the app, so you can keep a track of your connections without any hassle.

What makes Octoparse special? So what makes Octoparse different? For starters, you can simply start using the app as soon as it's downloaded. It automatically checks if there's a network nearby. If there is one, it immediately connects to the network and you don't even need to do anything more. Just sit back and relax and let the app do the work for you.

While surfing the internet, you will find that Octoparse is really fast when it comes to detecting and connecting to networks. The app supports both 802.11a and 802.11n, so your experience will be smooth regardless of the type of Wi-Fi router you have.

The second major difference is Octoparse's reliability. After spending a few weeks to see how reliable it really is, we'd say it's among the best. If a connection is lost, Octoparse will notify you so you can always try again. If you don't want to lose your time, just tap the connection and you'll be connected to the Wi-Fi network straight away.

How to scrape data from Octoparse?

How do I extract data from the Octoparse website?

You can either use the Data API or the Web Scraper. The API allows you to easily create apps or other services that would make use of the data hosted on the platform. The Web Scraper, however, is more efficient for extracting data for use in a local environment. For example, using Python, one could import data from these URLs and use them as if they were data in a local CSV or database table.

Scraping all pages (ie web scraping) isn't recommended in a production environment. To do web scraping in Octoparse, you need to upload all pages to your workspace and then use the Web Scraper. To see how to do this, continue reading.

Using the built-in web scraping features in Google Sheets. In order to scrape data from Octoparse, you must first save your data as a URL table in Google Sheets or another spreadsheet. However, there is also a way to use these URLs as data in Google Sheets, which doesn't involve saving the data at all. For this purpose, we are using Spreadsheet-ify. This will allow us to create the best possible workflow with Google Sheets to extract data as you need it.

Create your workspace to work with. First of all, we need to work in a workspace with which we'll export and manipulate the data. Creating a workspace with which we'll collect, analyze, compare and share data with users from around the world is our starting point.

To do so, we just go to File > New Workspace. You'll see an empty workspace displayed on your screen. On it, you'll be able to import and download data as soon as the file is uploaded.

Go to File > New Workspace. To upload data to our Octoparse workspace, select Upload file from the Workspace menu and import your file. Make sure the file is in either .csv or .txt format. The file format has nothing to do with the site itself but everything to do with what type of file you plan on uploading to the Site Explorer.

Then, click the Import file option below in order to enter the address of the file you just uploaded.

Is Octoparse an API?

In a previous post we introduced Octoparse, a JSON based search engine to explore your web applications.

In this article we're going to explore the question of whether Octoparse is an API or not. While it could be seen as both, Octoparse also behaves as an API in itself (and a damn good one).

Octoparse makes heavy use of the HTTP protocol (HTTP 1.1 and above), and therefore offers access to a vast range of resources. This includes but is not limited to public data sets, services, web apps, web services, APIs and more.

We will start our exploration by looking at data in public datasets. You have seen how to fetch HTML content of an URL through a series of endpoints, but you can also get any XML content via its endpoint . If the HTML content is fetched through the browser you'd know that when loaded into your browser, the XML version fetched from the URL would probably look like this:

You have already seen the use of endpoints for public data, but what if you wanted to explore an internal service's resources? Wouldn't it make more sense to just request the public information of the service as it is available in the service's documentation? And wouldn't it be great to be able to use all the same HTTP request options you are used to while browsing public datasets? As a proof-of-concept, here's an endpoint that finds the public dataset for the service, and then queries its documentation: Using the endpoints of public services is very convenient, as you don't need to do much to access the resource. However, it's a little bit inconvenient to find where exactly the documentation for a public service is. To resolve this, Octoparse provides another endpoints that works very similarly:

A few seconds later I can access the public dataset from the query, and the first page that appears in my browser shows exactly the same HTML content as the example above. The important thing is that the endpoints of public services are available from anywhere, regardless of whether they are accessible via regular HTTP requests or via Octoparse.

If you don't want to make your endpoints private, but want to share the available resources with others, Octoparse allows this as well.