Usually when I have any scraping to do I ask Thej  if he can do it and then take a nap. However, Thej is on vacation so I was stuck either waiting for him to come back or I could try to do it myself. It was basic text, not much html, no images, and a few pages, so I went for it with some non coder tools.
I checked the School of Data scraping section for some tools and they have a nice little section on using browser based scraping tools. I did a chrome store search and came across WebScraper.
I glanced through the video sort of paying attention got the gist of it and started to play with the tool.  It took awhile for me to figure out.  I highly recommend very carefully going through the tutorials.  The videos take you through the process but are not very clear for complete newbies like me so it took a few views to understand the hierarchy concept and how to adapt their example to the site I was scraping.
I got the hang of doing one page and then figuring out how to tell it to go to another page, again I had to spend quite a bit of time rewatching the tutorial. At the end of the day I got the data in neat columns in CSV without too much trouble. Â I would recommend WebScraper for people who want to do some basic scraping.
It is as visual as you can get though the terminology is still very technical. Â You have to do into the developer tools folder which can feel intimidating but ultimately satisfying in the end.
Though I’ll probably still call Thej.







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