Web scraping involves extracting data from websites programmatically. Ruby is a great language for scraping thanks to libraries like Nokogiri, Mechanize, and Anemone. ChatGPT is an AI assistant that can provide code snippets and explanations for web scraping tasks. This article covers web scraping in Ruby and how ChatGPT can help.
Setting Up a Ruby Environment
You'll need Ruby installed along with gems like Nokogiri, Anemone, and Mechanize:
# Nokogiri for HTML parsing
gem install nokogiri
# Anemone for crawling
gem install anemone
# Mechanize for browser automation
gem install mechanize
Introduction to Web Scraping in Ruby
Web scraping is done by sending HTTP requests to websites, then extracting data from the HTML, JSON or XML response. Useful Ruby libs:
Basic scraping workflow:
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:
Generating Explanations
Ask ChatGPT to explain web scraping concepts/specifics:
Writing Code Snippets
Provide a description of what you want to scrape and have ChatGPT generate starter Ruby code:
Validate any code before using.
Improving Prompts
Ask ChatGPT to suggest improvements if it doesn't provide helpful responses.
Asking Follow-up Questions
Chat with ChatGPT to get explanations for additional questions.
Explaining Errors
Share any errors and ask ChatGPT to debug and explain the issue.
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: Ruby code to download this page:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>
# ChatGPT provides this code
require 'open-uri'
url = '<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>'
html = URI.open(url).read
Step 2: Inspect HTML, table has class wikitable
Step 3: Extract table data to CSV
ChatGPT: Ruby code to extract wikitable table to CSV
# ChatGPT provides this code
require 'nokogiri'
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
table = doc.at('table.wikitable')
headers = table.xpath('.//tr[1]/th').map(&:text)
rows = table.xpath('.//tr[position()>1]').map { |tr|
tr.xpath('./td').map(&:text)
}
# save to CSV
# ...
This shows how we can quickly get Ruby scraping code from ChatGPT.
Conclusion
Key points:
ChatGPT + Ruby is great 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:
require 'net/http'
uri = URI("<https://api.proxiesapi.com/?url=example.com&key=XXX>")
response = Net::HTTP.get(uri)
Get started now with 1000 free API calls to supercharge your web scraping!