Web Scraping with Ruby & ChatGPT

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!