Is there a way to scrape sites using Edge Browser without installing Visual Studio?

[prabha_friend]

Please confirm. Thanks.

 

[cheekybuddha]

There are many ways to scrape websites.

Why do you need Edge browser?

Why do you think you might need Visual Studio?

 

[prabha_friend]

There are many ways to scrape websites.

Why do you need Edge browser?

Why do you think you might need Visual Studio?

That's the one we are using in the office - edge
I used selenium 4 but in visual studio...
Don't know whether I have to install such a heavy tool (Visual Studio) to achieve this...

 

[cheekybuddha]

Selenium appear to make an IDE you can use directly in your browser - it is installed as a browser extension.

 

[cheekybuddha]

Maybe overkill for your needs, but here are some useful tools/ideas (youtube)

 

[prabha_friend]

Only available for Chrome or Firefox

 

[cheekybuddha]

Edge = Chrome

 

[cheekybuddha]

How to install Chrome extensions in Edge

 

[561414]

Access has 4 ways to web scrape that I know of:
1. IE, if you want to interact
2. Web browser control, if you want to interact
3. Http request if you just want to retrieve the content
4. Selenium if you want to interact

I haven't used Selenium, as I found incompatibility issues, but I have used the Puppeteer library extensively and it's very capable, since it automates Chromium, an up-to-date browser that uses the same technology that Chrome and Edge use (plus, the library is made and supported by the same company that created the browser, Google), it will be able to scrape pretty much anything. But it does require you to install NodeJS and you'll have to work with text editors such as VS Code for this. Keep in mind that not all websites can be scraped with IE or the Web browser control because they are outdated. The new web browser could do this, I suppose, I don't have it, but it's supposed to support new web technologies.

As for your question, you can scrape a website using Edge alone, you just have to know some javascript and use its dev tools. For instance, you can open it with F12 (I think), and then, to find all div tags in the website, you can write this in the console: document.getElementsByTagName("div"). And it will return all divs in the website. You can refine your search little by little and create a bookmarklet that does the heavy lifting. Just create a bookmark and in the URL, add something like javascript:(function(){ /* your code here */ })();. Here's a bookmarklet you can try right now if you're using a non mobile device, like a PC or laptop, it counts the occurrences of the word "Access" in any website, if you ever needed that:

javascript:(function() {
    var word = "access";
    var regex = new RegExp("\\b" + word + "\\b", "gi");
    var count = 0;
  
    function walk(node) {
        if (node.nodeType === 3) {
            var matches = node.data.match(regex);
            count += matches ? matches.length : 0;
        } else if (node.nodeType === 1 && node.nodeName !== "SCRIPT") {
            for (var i = 0; i < node.childNodes.length; i++) {
                walk(node.childNodes[i]);
            }
        }
    }
  
    walk(document.body);
  
    alert("The word '" + word + "' appears " + count + " time(s) on this page.");
})();

Create a bookmark in your browser, in the URL paste the above code. Click it and you'll see an alert with the count.