Who can teach me / point me to a great resource to create a web scraper?

Scraping breaks really easily and all the time. You might be spending a lot of time just keeping the scraper working.

If possible I’d just get static data and build a prototype. Validate it first with a few people and if the values there maybe there’s a way to get REST/JSON access to the data.

I’ve built several web scrapers in the past, both for data collection and as as SaaS application. I have to say that python has served me well - particularly packages like selenium and bs4 make it pretty simple. Like these other guys have said, there are a lot of security issues you’ll run into, but depending on the kind of data you’re scraping.. you can usually find away around it. Take your time!

Good luck, hit me up if you want a quick demo or something 🤙

Don't want to discourage you, but scrapers are hard, very hard, however easy they seem. Between captchas and proxies and everything, if you're not versed in programming, I'd really vouch against it. Also there's the problem of a thousand scrapers existing already.

Then again, if you really believe in the idea, go for it. I'd recommend some scripting language like PHP or Python. Just google it and millions of resources will pop out.

Best of luck.

Check out dashblock.com, parseur.com, or octoparse.com for no-code scrapers.

I haven't used any yet, but I'm considering Dashblock for a project I have coming up.

(ruby)
require 'open-uri'
require ‘nokogiri’
page = open('http://example.com').read
data = Nokogiri::HTML(page).css(‘div.targetClass’)
result = { key: data }
File.write(‘path/filename.json’, result.to_json)

🤷‍♂️