Scala is a great language for web scraping thanks to its functional programming features and concise syntax. ChatGPT is an AI assistant that can provide explanations and generate code for scraping tasks. This article covers web scraping in Scala with help from ChatGPT.
Setting Up Scala for Web Scraping
You'll need the JVM installed along with these libraries:
// Scalaj for HTTP requests
libraryDependencies += "org.scalaj" %% "scalaj-http" % "2.4.2"
// Jsoup for HTML parsing
libraryDependencies += "org.jsoup" % "jsoup" % "1.13.1"
// CSV library for CSV parsing
libraryDependencies += "com.github.tototoshi" %% "scala-csv" % "1.3.6"
Introduction to Web Scraping in Scala
Web scraping involves sending HTTP requests to websites and extracting data from the HTML, JSON or XML responses. Useful Scala 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 Scala 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: Scala code to download this page:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>
// ChatGPT provides this code
import scalaj.http._
val response = Http("<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe>").asString
Step 2: Inspect HTML, table has class wikitable
Step 3: Extract table data to CSV
ChatGPT: Scala code to extract wikitable table to CSV
// ChatGPT provides this code
import org.jsoup.Jsoup
import scala.collection.JavaConverters._
val doc = Jsoup.parse(response.body)
val table = doc.select("table.wikitable").first
// Extract headers
val headers = table.select("thead th").map(_.text()).toSeq
// Extract rows
val rows = table.select("tbody tr").map(row =>
row.select("td").map(_.text()).toSeq
).toSeq
// Write rows to CSV
// ...
This demonstrates using ChatGPT to get Scala scraping code quickly.
Conclusion
Key points:
ChatGPT + Scala 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:
import scalaj.http._
Http("<https://api.proxiesapi.com/?url=example.com&key=XXX>").asString
Get started now with 1000 free API calls to supercharge your web scraping!