How to scrap content on web page Linux? (Step-by-step tutorial)

Okay, so, I wanted to mess around with grabbing stuff from web pages on my Linux box. You know, just pulling out text or data, that sort of thing. I figured I’d share my little adventure here, nothing fancy, just what I did.

First off, I needed some tools. I remembered hearing about cURL and Wget before, so I started with those. I mean, they’re like the old-timers of the internet, right? Everyone talks about them when it comes to fetching stuff from websites. I went ahead and made sure they were installed on my machine. Thankfully, they already were, because they are common in Linux! Good start!

Using cURL

So, cURL. This thing is pretty straightforward. It’s a command-line tool, so you just type stuff in the terminal. I just wanted to see what a web page looked like in its raw HTML form. I typed something like, uh, `curl [some website]` into the terminal. Boom! There it was, the whole HTML mess right there in my terminal. It was a lot to take in, to be honest, but hey, it worked!

Now, to grab the content and put it into a file. How do we do that? I had a feeling it will be easy. I changed a little bit in my previous command. Just added `-o` followed by a file name, like `curl -o * [some website]`. Ran it, and… nothing happened on the screen. But then I checked, and bam! There was a file named `*` with all the website’s content. Neat, huh?

Wget

Next up, Wget. This one’s a bit different. I learned that it is less common than cURL. I ran `wget [some website]`. This command will save the web page into a file. I think the file’s name was “*” or something like that. It is a little bit less verbose, and feels simpler, which is good for me.

But I think Wget can do more than this, like, downloading a whole website with all its pages and stuff. It’s powerful! But, I didn’t really dive into that. I just wanted the basics, you know?

Thoughts

So, yeah, that’s pretty much it. It wasn’t that hard, to be honest. cURL and Wget are both cool in their own ways. I guess if you just want to quickly look at a page’s source code, cURL is your guy. If you want to download a copy, either one works, but Wget might be a bit simpler.

• cURL: Good for a quick look.
• Wget: Easier for downloading.

I’m no expert, but this was a fun little experiment. Maybe next time I’ll try to parse the HTML, pull out specific parts. We’ll see. Anyway, hope this was helpful to someone out there. It’s pretty cool what you can do with just a few commands, right?