Kotlin is a great language for web scraping thanks to its concise syntax, safety features and excellent library support. ChatGPT is an AI assistant that can provide explanations and generate code for scraping tasks. This article covers web scraping in Kotlin with help from ChatGPT.
Setting Up Kotlin for Web Scraping
You'll need Kotlin installed along with these libraries:
// Ktor for HTTP requests
implementation("io.ktor:ktor-client-core:2.0.0")
// Jsoup for HTML parsing
implementation("org.jsoup:jsoup:1.14.3")
// CSVWriter for CSV output
implementation("com.github.doyaaaaaken:kotlin-csv-jvm:1.2.0")
Introduction to Web Scraping in Kotlin
Web scraping involves sending HTTP requests to websites and extracting data from the HTML, JSON or XML responses. Useful Kotlin libraries:
Typical web scraping workflow:
Using ChatGPT for Web Scraping Help
ChatGPT is an AI assistant created by Anthropic 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 Kotlin 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 assistance.
Goal
Extract the chronology table from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe
Step 1: Download page
ChatGPT: Kotlin code to download this page:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>
// ChatGPT provides this code
val response = client.get<String>("<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>")
Step 2: Inspect HTML, table has class wikitable
Step 3: Extract table data to CSV
ChatGPT: Kotlin code to extract wikitable table to CSV
// ChatGPT provides this code
val doc = Jsoup.parse(response)
val table = doc.select("table.wikitable").first()
val headers = table.select("thead th").map { it.text() }
val rows = table.select("tbody tr").map { row ->
row.select("td").map { it.text() }
}
// Write rows to CSV
This demonstrates using ChatGPT to get Kotlin scraping code quickly.
Conclusion
Key points:
ChatGPT + Kotlin is a great combo for creating 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:
val response = client.get<String>("<https://api.proxiesapi.com/?url=example.com&key=XXX>")
Get started now with 1000 free API calls to supercharge your web scraping!