Web Scraper

Extract structured data from websites using BeautifulSoup and requests - turn any webpage into usable data.

When to Use This Skill

• Competitor research - Scrape pricing, features, positioning
• Lead generation - Extract contact info from directories
• Content audit - Pull headings, links, meta data
• Price monitoring - Track competitor pricing changes
• Data collection - Gather research data from multiple sources

What Claude Does vs What You Decide

Dependencies

pip install beautifulsoup4 requests pandas click lxml

Commands

Scrape Elements

python scripts/main.py scrape https://example.com --selector "h1,h2,p"
python scripts/main.py scrape https://example.com --selector ".product-price"

Extract Links

python scripts/main.py links https://example.com
python scripts/main.py links https://example.com --internal-only

Extract Emails

python scripts/main.py emails https://example.com
python scripts/main.py emails https://example.com --depth 2

Extract Structured Data

python scripts/main.py structured https://example.com/article --schema article
python scripts/main.py structured https://example.com/product --schema product

Examples

Example 1: Scrape Competitor Pricing

python scripts/main.py scrape https://competitor.com/pricing --selector ".price,.plan-name"

# Output:
# Extracted 6 elements
# 1. Starter - $29/mo
# 2. Pro - $99/mo
# 3. Enterprise - Contact us

Example 2: Extract Article Content

python scripts/main.py structured https://blog.example.com/post --schema article

# Output: article_data.json
# {
#   "title": "How to Scale Your Startup",
#   "author": "Jane Doe",
#   "date": "2024-01-15",
#   "content": "...",
#   "word_count": 1523
# }

CSS Selector Reference

tag

h1

p

div

.class

.price

.title

#id

#main-content

tag.class

div.product

tag[attr]

a[href]

parent > child

ul > li

tag1, tag2

h1, h2, h3

Ethical Scraping Guidelines

1. Check robots.txt - Respect site's scraping policy
2. Rate limit - Don't overload servers (1-2 req/sec)
3. Identify yourself - Use descriptive User-Agent
4. Cache requests - Don't re-scrape unchanged pages
5. Terms of Service - Check if scraping is allowed

Skill Boundaries

What This Skill Does Well

• Structuring strategic analysis
• Identifying market opportunities
• Creating strategic frameworks
• Synthesizing competitive data

What This Skill Cannot Do

• Replace market research
• Guarantee strategic success
• Know proprietary competitor info
• Make executive decisions

Related Skills

• competitor-monitor - Monitor competitor changes
• pdf-extractor - Extract from PDFs

Skill Metadata

• Mode: centaur

category: automation
subcategory: data-extraction
dependencies: [beautifulsoup4, requests, pandas]
difficulty: intermediate
time_saved: 5+ hours/week