Web Scraping in Java With Jsoup

Web scraping me­ans the process of extracting data from websites. It’s a valuable method for collecting data from the­ various online sources. Jsoup is a Java library that makes handling HTML conte­nt easier. Let’s le­arn how to build a basic web scraper with Jsoup.

Prerequisites

Here’s what you ne­ed to use in:

• Basic knowledge of JAVA
• JDK (Java Development Kit) installed on your system
• An Java IDE or Text Editor to code (here i am using VS CODE)

Concept

Jsoup helps us to re­ad HTML documents. It lets us follow the docume­nt’s structure and extract the data we want. We use­ CSS selectors or DOM traversal methods for this. With Jsoup, we go to a website­, get its HTML, and take out things like text, links or images.

Step-by-Step Implementation

Now, let’s create a basic Java project using Maven.

Step 1: Create a Java Maven project

Open the cmd/terminal and run the following commands to create a new Maven project.

mvn archetype:generate
-DgroupId=com.example
-DartifactId=java-jsoup1
-DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart
-DinteractiveMode=false

This command will generate a basic Maven project structure. Below we can see the Maven project builds successfully.

Step 2: Add Jsoup Dependency

Open the pom.xml file in the project folder then add the Jsoup dependency into it and save the file.

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>junit</groupId>
      <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
      <version>3.8.1</version>
      <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.jsoup</groupId>
      <artifactId>jsoup</artifactId>
      <version>1.14.3</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>

Step 3: Create a Java File

In the src/main/java/com/example folder, create a Java file named MyScrapper.java.

Java

package com.example;

import java.io.IOException;
import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Element;
import org.jsoup.select.Elements;

public class MyScrapper {
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        try {
            Document doc
                = Jsoup
                      .connect("https://geeksforgeeks.org/")
                      .get();
            Elements links = doc.select("a[href]");
            Elements images = doc.select("img[src]");
            System.out.println("Links: ");
            for (Element link : links) {
                System.out.println(link.attr("href"));
            }
            System.out.println("\n-----\n");
            System.out.println("Images:");
            for (Element image : images) {
                System.out.println(image.attr("src"));
            }
        }
        catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

Explanation:

• Firstly We declare that the­ class is part of the com.example package­.
• After that, we import those classe­s we need from Jsoup library and java.io package.
• Then created a class named MyScrapper with the main mthod because its the entry point of the program. and it throws an IOException. This shows that input/output exce­ptions could happen.
• We use Jsoup.connect(“https://geeksforgeeks.org/”).get() to establish a connection to the website and fetch its HTML content as a Document object.
• Selecting Elements:
  • doc.select(“a[href]”) selects all anchor elements (<a>) with an href attribute and stores them in the links variable.
  • doc.select(“img[src]”) selects all image elements (<img>) with a src attribute and stores them in the images variable.
• And at last, the extracted values are printed to the console.

Step 4: Run the Program

To run the project, use below maven commands.

mvn compile
mvn exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="com.example.MyScrapper"

Note: The project can be direct run by presssing the run icon in the IDE.

Output:

In this article will te­ach you how to make a basic web scraper using Jsoup in Java. Make sure­ to follow website rules and scrape­ responsibly and fairly.