What is HTTP Ripper?
HTTP Ripper is an open-source web scraping framework written in Java. It provides a range of tools for automating web scraping tasks such as:
- Extracting data from HTML pages by parsing the DOM structure
- Submitting forms and scraping the result pages
- Log in to websites by managing cookies and sessions
- Recursive crawling by following links to scrape entire websites
- Browser automation for dynamic page scraping with Selenium
- Exporting scraped data to JSON, XML, CSV formats
Some key features include configurable spiders for flexible scraping, Regex based element extraction, proxy support for rotation, throttling options to avoid flooding servers, detailed scraping reports and metrics. It has an extensible plugin architecture to add custom functionality.
HTTP Ripper can help with various web scraping needs like lead generation, price monitoring, news aggregation, research and analysis. Its automation features make it easier to scrape complex sites. With a Java API, it can be customized for large scale distributed web crawling.