Downloading Images from a Website with Java and JSoup

In this article, we will learn how to use Java and the JSoup library to download all the images from a Wikipedia page.

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Overview

The goal is to extract the names, breed groups, local names, and image URLs for all dog breeds listed on this Wikipedia page. We will store the image URLs, download the images and save them to a local folder.

Here are the key steps we will cover:

Import required packages
Send HTTP request to fetch the Wikipedia page
Parse the page HTML using JSoup
Find the table with dog breed data using a CSS selector
Iterate through the table rows
Extract data from each column
Download images and save locally
Print/process extracted data

Let's go through each of these steps in detail.

Imports

We need these packages:

import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Element;
import org.jsoup.select.Elements;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.URL;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Paths;
import java.nio.file.StandardCopyOption;

Jsoup - Scrapes HTML

java.io - File I/O

java.net - Networking

Send HTTP Request

To download the web page:

String url = "<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_dog_breeds>";

Document doc = Jsoup.connect(url).userAgent("Jsoup Scraper").get();

Jsoup provides the connect() method to fetch and parse the page.

Parse HTML

The returned Document contains the parsed HTML.

Find Breed Table

We use a CSS selector to find the table element:

Elements table = doc.select("table.wikitable.sortable");

This selects the

tag with the required CSS classes.

Iterate Through Rows

We loop through the rows like this:

for (Element row : table.select("tr")) {

  // Extract data

}

We select all

elements within the table.

Extract Column Data

Inside the loop, we extract the column data:

Elements cells = row.select("td, th");

String name = cells.get(0).select("a").text();
String group = cells.get(1).text();

String localName = cells.get(2).select("span").text();
if(localName.equals("")) {
  localName = "";
}

String imgSrc = cells.get(3).select("img").attr("src");

We use text() for text and attr() for attributes.

Download Images

To download and save images:

if(!imgSrc.equals("")) {

  InputStream input = new URL(imgSrc).openStream();
  Files.copy(input, Paths.get("dog_images/" + name + ".jpg"), StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);

}

We open the image stream and save it to a file.

Store Extracted Data

We store the extracted data in lists:

names.add(name);
groups.add(group);
localNames.add(localName);
images.add(imgSrc);

The lists can then be processed as needed.

And that's it! Here is the full code:

// Imports
import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Element;
import org.jsoup.select.Elements;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.URL;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Paths;
import java.nio.file.StandardCopyOption;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class Scraper {

  public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

    List<String> names = new ArrayList<>();
    List<String> groups = new ArrayList<>();
    List<String> localNames = new ArrayList<>();
    List<String> images = new ArrayList<>();

    String url = "<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_dog_breeds>";

    Document doc = Jsoup.connect(url).userAgent("Jsoup Scraper").get();

    Elements table = doc.select("table.wikitable.sortable");

    for (Element row : table.select("tr")) {

      Elements cells = row.select("td, th");

      String name = cells.get(0).select("a").text();
      String group = cells.get(1).text();

      String localName = cells.get(2).select("span").text();
      if(localName.equals("")) {
        localName = "";
      }

      String imgSrc = cells.get(3).select("img").attr("src");

      if(!imgSrc.equals("")) {

        InputStream input = new URL(imgSrc).openStream();
        Files.copy(input, Paths.get("dog_images/" + name + ".jpg"), StandardCopyOption.REPLACE_EXISTING);

      }

      names.add(name);
      groups.add(group);
      localNames.add(localName);
      images.add(imgSrc);

    }

  }

}

This provides a complete Java solution using JSoup to scrape data and images from HTML tables. The same approach can apply to many websites.

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