Collecting Data from Web Pages with OutWit

Productivity Sauce

Web scraping is a clever idea, but extracting data from a Web page manually can be a real chore. The new OutWit extension provides a solution to this problem. Better yet, it allows you to save and export the scraped data, which makes it a great research tool. Although the extension is still at a very early stage of development, it has the potential to turn your favorite browser into a powerful tool for extracting and organizing data. The current version already boasts an impressive list of features, including data structure recognition, page and image link extraction, e-mail extraction, table and list extraction, and more.

Although OutWit is a rather advanced tool, using it for simple Web scraping is not particularly difficult. Let's say you want to extract data from the Population of the 5 largest cities in the EU table and export the data for use in a Calc spreadsheet. Press the OutWit button in the Firefox toolbar to open the OutWit Hub window. The left pane contains a tree of data types supported by the OutWit Hub. Navigate to page -> data -> tables, and you should see the data from the tables on the Wikipedia page. Locate and select the rows containing the city data (see screenshot below) and drag them onto the Catch pane at the bottom.

To save the selected data, choose the File -> Save Catch as command. To export the data for use in a spreadsheet, select all the rows in the Catch pane, right-click on the selection, and choose the Export Selection as command. OutWit can export the data in the Excel format only, but since OpenOffice.org Calc can read .xls files, that's not a big issue. In a similar manner, you can collect other types of data, including lists, email addresses, RSS feeds, images, and much more.

OutWit is actually more than just a mere Firefox extension. It is a platform that allows you to create your own Web data collection solutions called outfits. In fact, the OutWit Hub is an outfit built upon the OutWit kernel. Besides catching all sorts of data from a Web page, you can use OutWit Hub to create your own scrapers, and the following post on the OutWit blog shows you how to do that.

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