The features described below are only available in the Business Edition and are not available in the Free or Personal Edition.

The Bookmark action "Scraper" can extract content and structured data from monitored pages and save it to a file on your hard disk. Supported output formats are XML, CSV, or a tab-delimited file.

Typical data that can be extracted includes product prices, product information, news articles, or the highlighted changes from the last detected update.

Templates

To extract data from a page, you must define a Template. A Template contains fields that describe the content to be extracted. These fields can be selected interactively using the selection assistant. When the Bookmark action is executed, the Template is used to extract the content and save it in a structured format on your hard disk.

Templates can be defined individually per Bookmark or as shared Templates that are stored on your hard disk and used by multiple Bookmarks.

Fields

The following types of content can be extracted:

• Single fields
  Fields can be located anywhere on the page. You can specify whether all matches or only the first X matches should be extracted. A typical example is extracting a product name and price.
  
  
• Group of fields
  You can define a recurring page area that contains specific fields. WebSite-Watcher then extracts all groups, including the defined fields for each group. A typical example is a table row, where the group is the row and the fields are the cells in that row. WebSite-Watcher can then extract all rows and their cells.
  Another example is a topic thread in a forum, where a group represents a complete posting. Each posting contains the user name and the posted text. WebSite-Watcher can extract all postings with user names and text.
  
  
• Highlighted changes
  Extracts the content that is displayed in the "Changes" tab of the internal browser. You can choose between HTML format and TEXT format. If you select the TEXT format, all changes are marked with [change] and [/change].

Select CSS definition per field

Use the following steps to select a CSS definition for a field:

1. Click the button "..." on the right side of the CSS field. This opens a window where you can select the most suitable CSS definition.
2. Select the content to be extracted in the left panel. All possible CSS definitions are displayed in the middle panel.
3. Select a CSS definition in the middle panel. The right panel shows all matches.
4. If the correct CSS definition is found, click "OK".

As an alternative to selecting the content in the left panel, you can use the "Select" button in the toolbar. This opens another view of the page. This method may be more convenient in some cases, but it may not work with all page layouts.

Output formats

The extracted data can be saved in the following formats:

XML

Standard XML structure with defined field names and values.

CSV (full)

This format contains the following fields:

• item: Defines the association between rows
• type: Type of extracted data, field, group, or changes
• group: Defined group name, if the extracted element is a group
• field: Defined field name
• value: Extracted data

The following characters are encoded:

• \ as \\
• New line as \n
• " as \"

Tab-delimited (full)

This format contains the following fields:

• item - Defines the association between rows
• type - Type of extracted data, field, group, or changes
• group - Defined group name, if the extracted element is a group
• field - Defined field name
• value - Extracted data

The following characters are encoded:

• \ as \\
• Tab as \t
• New line as \n

CSV (simple), Tab-delimited (simple)

The simple format can only be used if the Template contains a single element, for example a single field or one group of fields. Characters are encoded as listed above.

Output file

Defines where the file is saved on your hard disk.

Variables in the file name: