C++ is a powerful language for web scraping thanks to its speed, flexibility and wide library support. ChatGPT is an AI assistant that can provide explanations and generate code for web scraping tasks. This article covers web scraping in C++ with help from ChatGPT.
Setting Up C++ for Web Scraping
You'll need a C++ compiler and these libraries installed:
// libcurl for HTTP requests
// libxml2 for XML/HTML parsing
// csv for CSV parsing
Introduction to Web Scraping in C++
Web scraping involves sending HTTP requests to websites and extracting data from the HTML, JSON or XML responses. Useful C++ libraries:
Typical web scraping workflow:
Using ChatGPT for Web Scraping Help
ChatGPT is an AI assistant created by OpenAI to be helpful, harmless, and honest. It can provide explanations and generate code snippets for web scraping:
Getting Explanations
Ask ChatGPT to explain web scraping concepts or specifics:
Generating Code Snippets
Give a description of what you want to scrape and have ChatGPT provide starter C++ code:
Validate any code before using.
Improving Prompts
Ask ChatGPT to suggest ways to improve your prompt if it doesn't provide helpful responses.
Asking Follow-up Questions
Chat with ChatGPT to get explanations for any other questions you have.
Explaining Errors
Share any errors and ask ChatGPT to debug and explain the problem.
Web Scraping Example Using ChatGPT
Let's walk through scraping a Wikipedia page with ChatGPT's help.
Goal
Extract the chronology table from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe
Step 1: Download page
ChatGPT: C++ code to download this page:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>
// ChatGPT provides this code
#include <curl/curl.h>
CURL* curl = curl_easy_init();
if(curl) {
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>");
// Set options and perform request
curl_easy_cleanup(curl);
}
Step 2: Inspect HTML, table has class wikitable
Step 3: Extract table data to CSV
ChatGPT: C++ code to extract wikitable table to CSV
// ChatGPT provides this code
#include <libxml/HTMLparser.h>
htmlDocPtr doc = htmlReadMemory(html.c_str(), html.size(), "", NULL, HTML_PARSE_NOBLANKS | HTML_PARSE_NOERROR | HTML_PARSE_NOWARNING | HTML_PARSE_NONET);
xmlNodePtr table = get_element_by_class(doc, "wikitable");
// Extract headers
vector<string> headers;
// Extract rows
vector<vector<string>> rows;
// Write rows to CSV
// ...
xmlFreeDoc(doc);
This demonstrates using ChatGPT to get C++ scraping code quickly.
Conclusion
Key points:
ChatGPT + C++ is a powerful combo for building web scrapers.
However, some limitations:
A more robust solution is using a web scraping API like Proxies API
Proxies API provides:
Easily scrape any site:
// HTTP request to Proxies API endpoint
#include <curl/curl.h>
CURL* curl = curl_easy_init();
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://api.proxiesapi.com/?url=example.com&key=XXX");
// Set options and perform request
curl_easy_cleanup(curl);Get started now with 1000 free API calls to supercharge your web scraping!