WrapAPI v2: build APIs, bots, and scrapers on websites; feedback appreciated

wrapapi.com

7 points·phsource··5 comments

Hey everyone! My name is Peter, and I'm the creator of WrapAPI. We recently launched a new version (thanks in large part to the feedback from the HN community from our launch last year [1]), and would love your thoughts.

In short, we've:

1) Improved the Chrome extension to guess what parts of your requests are important.

2) Made a new browser-like "builder" that should be much more intuitive to use compared to the old system.

Let us know what you think!

This seems like it could be really useful. How do you deal with sites that might block you?

We currently don't deal with it, but when using WrapAPI, you can specify your own proxy servers and we'll route the requests through them.

This was yet another of the features that we added only after getting feedback last time around from HN, so good catch!

I have to do a ton of scraping for my job (sadly), and I've been pretty happy using things like Kimono, import.io, etc. Is this any different from what I've listed?

WrapAPI is in many ways inspired by Kimono for its ease-of-use, but is much more powerful. You can send POST requests and fill out forms, as well as create different types of outputs and chain them. Kimono and import.io, on the other hand, are very much designed for scraping tabular data.

If you're pretty satisfied with import.io and Kimono, it might be worth to just keep using them! Give WrapAPI a shot, though, since it can do a lot of things those tools can't.

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