I'm trying to scrape the <header> section of a website's source code. Looking for specific strings of characters in the code that identify tools a company may be using. Is there a webscraping tool that can scrape the header? I tried 3 approaches but they all focus on the body.
Yes, we have the BuiltWith integration which specifically identifies technology stacks by analyzing website source code, including header sections. For custom string extraction, use our Scrape Website action with the "Extract Custom Regex" field to search for specific character patterns in the source code. BuiltWith is ideal for detecting tools and frameworks, while the regex option gives you precise control over what strings to extract from any part of the website's code.
BuiltWith is good for more established tools (e.g. Hubspot), but it doesn't cover lots of newer tools. Is there an alternative?
Yes, we have several alternatives for extracting specific strings from website headers: ZenRows - Excellent for bypassing anti-scraping measures and can extract data from any part of a website's source code, including headers. Our native Scrape Website action - Use the "Extract Custom Regex" field to search for specific character patterns in the source code, perfect for finding newer tool identifiers in headers. ScrapeMagic - Provides advanced parsing capabilities for extracting structured data from web pages, including header sections. Apify actors - Access a vast marketplace of specialized scrapers, many designed for specific data extraction tasks that could target header content. For detecting newer tools, the regex approach with our native scraper or ZenRows would be most effective since you can define exact string patterns to search for.
these are not scraping the universal header. just the body
Hey Brad, thanks for reaching out and sorry for the delay. Did you try out Claygent? See an example of accessing the header with one of OpenAI's models:
Let me know how it goes and happy to brainstorm alternatives.
Hi Daniel K. - Thanks for getting back. Yes, I tried Claygent and i tried it again using Open AI. Still not getting the desired outcome. Seems getting source code from a header is more challenging for Clay. The site I keep checking is moduscreate.com because I know they use 6Sense. If you right click on their website and choose inspect, you can find a string of characters for "6Sense" as well as "_6si" in the header code. I ideally want Clay to replicate what i can do manually. But do it at scale.
Got it. In that case, it sounds like a job for a custom scraper. Can you sign up for a free account on zenrows and try it out here and see if you're getting the data back for moduscreate.com:
Daniel K. - thanks. Been wrangling Zenrows to see if i can get what i need from it. I seem to be getting the <header> source code now, but it's not all the code. using the url above (moduscreate), if i inspect the source code manually i can clearly see the string for 6sense in the code (see image). But none of this is appearing in the output from zenrows. any thoughts?
Hmm, not sure how to proceed here, honestly. Was ZenRows support able to help at all? I think the best next step is to disable auto-parse and use Zenrow's CSS selector manually—can you give that a try?
Also, you might want to consider adding an Apify source to see if it yields better results. We integrate with them. They offer a generous free tier. Here's one scraper you could try, but they have several others that might work. Let me know how it goes :)
i tried apify too but was unsuccessful. no FWIW, I am able to get a successful scape of headers with Gumloop using their equivalent of a Claygent. i may need to come up w a flow that somehow incorporates both Clay and Gumloop. appreciate the help.
Got it. Alternatively, you can try using n8n and run Python code within a node. You could host it in the cloud for around $5. Also, you might want to try ScrapingBee—it's similar to ZenRows. Have a great one!