Quick Start
Let's get you up to speed with everything you need to build your first web scraping project using Screpto - It all takes only a minute or two!
Install extension
Visit our extension page in the Chrome web store via the link below and click Add extension.
Visit Chrome storeOpen devtools
After successfully adding the extension, right click and select Inspect to open the devtools then open Screpto's panel.
ctrl + alt + J
Watch tutorialAccess account
Complete installation by signing up (if you are new to Screpto) or logging into your account.
Watch tutorialCreate a new task
You're now ready to create your first task and to do so, simply click on New Task button.
Watch tutorialCustomize task structure
In this example, we're going to customize our task so that it contains two data types that will store data we later select from this page.
- Open settings menu of the object named data by clicking on the three dots icon
- Add one object and two arrays
- Rename the object to general by clicking on and replacing the automatically generated name
- Rename the other two arrays to headline and articles respectively.
Select elements from a page
Now that we have our task the way we want it, we can start selecting elements and adding them to our object general:
- Toggle the icon inside the object general to enable selection of elements from page.
- Point and click on all the examples below
- Hit Enter to end selection or Esc to discard it.
The examples 👇
Watch tutorialMulti-select similar elements
After successfully filling our general object, it's time to add the headline in the table below inside our headline array in bulk.
- Toggle the icon inside the array headline to enable selection of elements from page.
- Point and click on the first title in the table below
- While hovering over the first title, press and hold ctrl
- All similar elements should be highlighted, confirm selection by clicking the first title once again.
- Hit Enter to end selection or Esc to discard it.
| First title: Germany's State Distance-Learning University |
| Second title: Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme |
| Third title: Why I Wrote “The Crucible” (1996) |
| Fourth title: Why radio receivers won’t tune 800-900 MHz |
| Fifth title: MicroStrategy will have 0.3% of all Bitcoin supply by the end of 2020 |
| Sixth title: Casio Graphing Scientific Calculator Fx-9860GIII Comes with MicroPython |
| Seventh title: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber |
| Eighth title: Linux binary compatible unikernel for virtualized environments |
| Nineth title: Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keys |
| Tenth title: The State of Linux Debuggers |
Duplication and element updating
Now that we have all of our headlines inside the headline array, we would also like to extract another attribute from the same elements. To do so:
- Open the headline array's settings menu by clicking the three dots icon and click duplicate
- Rename the newly created array to link
- select all the elements inside the link array until all are highlighted in a blue color
- Change the selected attribute from content to title.
- Collapse the link array
Organizing and merging elements
Using drag-and-drop feature, we can move elements anywhere to get the result we want. In this example, we will move both the headline and link arrays inside articles and merge them.
- Collapse all the elements
- Drag and drop the headline array inside articles
- Drag and drop the link array inside articles
- Click on the merging icon once it appears on the articles element.
Preview results
Preview results of your selection at all times by simply clicking the eye icon
option+V
Watch tutorialRun task on the cloud
One more step to finalize your task, let's configure your task and launch it to run periodically on the cloud.
- Go to task settings by clicking on the icon
- Enable Javascript rendering
- Change schedule to run every week
- Click Create task