Always Check for the Hidden API when Web Scraping

DISCORD (NEW): / discord
If this method if available, its the best way to scrape data from site. I will show you how to find the API endpoint that we can use to directly get the JSON data that is being sent from the server, before JavaScript gets its mucky paws on it and makes it look like what we see in our browser. Its quick and simple, and with just a few extra tips and techniques it can transform your web scraping.
Scraper API: www.scrapingbe...
Patreon: / johnwatsonrooney
Proxies: proxyscrape.co...
Hosting: Digital Ocean: m.do.co/c/c7c9...
Gear I use: www.amazon.co....

[@hectord.7107]

I've doing this for years as a self taught programmer, there are some little tricks you did here that i didn't know, thank you for the video.

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Glad it was helpful!

[@sworatex1683]

It's my first year in programming and there was nothing new actually. I don't even think that pain was worth it I'd just make the scraper in js and make it return a json string.

[@sworatex1683]

But I guess that would be useless for bigger projects. I'd just do it in js if I want like an actual product list like this.

[@gesuchter]

@D R lol

[@mattshu]

@D R how do you “block” scraping??

[@freekdl6648]

I rarely praise anything, but this tutorial was SO good! Well explained, no filler. In 7 or 8 minutes you guided me through finding the hidden information I needed, which tools I need to use and how to automate it. This tutorial gave me enough confidence to try to write my first Python script! Within hours I built a scraper that can pull all metadata for a full NFT collection from a marketplace. Without this video it would have taken days/weeks to discover all of this

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

That awesome! thank you very kind!

[@channul4887]

"In 7 or 8 minutes" More like 11

[@freekdl6648]

@@channul4887 Nope! I had different goals so no need to follow the full tutorial

[@MelonPython]

I even added it in my playlist. Great video. Definetely starting to love API's more and more.

[@danielcardin9241]

Because of this video, I was able to start my own rockets and satellites company. In only four hours, I started the company, launched thousands of rockets, and now I have my own interplanetary wireless intranet from which I can control the entire galaxy! Thanks again!

[@abc.2924]

I've been using this trick for a while now, and I've learned it from you, so thanks. Amazing work man

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

That’s great 👍

[@transatlant1c]

Nice video. It’s worth noting as well that many APIs will pageinate, so rather than checking how many total results exist and manually iterating over them - you just check to see if the ‘next page url’ or equivalent key exists in the results and if so, get that too until it doesn’t exist anymore, merging/appending each time until the dataset is complete 👍

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Yes you’re right thank you!

[@ianroberts6531]

In fact you can see at 05:33 that this particular API does just that - there's "nextPageURL" and "totalPages" at the end of the response JSON.

[@zenon1903]

Please ignore my first comment. I checked out your first video in this series and learned about using scrapy shell to test each line of code. With that I found the bug in my code. The code worked PERFECTLY as advertised. Your the man! Much thanks!

[@brockobama257]

bro, you're a game changer and i love you. if i ever see you in person ill offer to buy you a beer, or lunch, coffee whatever

[@gleysonoliveira802]

This video was the answer to my prayers! The next best option was to watch an one hour video and hope they would teach what you taught... In 10 minutes!!! 👏👏👏

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Thank you glad it helped!!

[@tikendraw]

I just want you to never stop creating such informative video. For god sake.

[@judgewooden]

I like how you regularly start sentences with 'you might think' assuming we are all idiots. I approve, glad smart people, like you, make time to explain to us plebs how the world works. Apprecated.

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Hey, thanks. I do my best to explain things how I would have wanted to be taught

[@Jacob-gy9bg]

Wow, thanks for this excellent tutorial! I just spent all this time writing cumbersome Selenium code, when it turns out all the data I was looking for was already right there!

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Great! That’s exactly what I was hoping to achieve with this video

[@shivan2418]

This is, no joke, the most useful video I ever saw on KZbin!

[@Kralnor]

This is a true gold nugget. Thanks for demonstrating how to easily view the request in Insomnia and auto-generate code!

[@marlinhicks]

Been using python for a couple years now as a picked up language and I really appreciate getting to see how someone experienced approaches these problems

[@JeanOfmArc]

You have shown me the light. Thank you for stopping me from making more web scripts that load up web pages in browsers to click buttons.

[@JeanOfmArc]

I have tried this method, but sadly the site I am trying to scrape from returns "error": "invalid_client", "error_description": "The client credentials provided were invalid, the request is unauthorized." Am I out of luck?

[@drkskwlkr]

Loved everything about this video! Great delivery style, production quality and interesting topic for me. First time visitor to this channel and not a Python user (thanks, KZbin, for your weird but helpful predictive algorithms).

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it

[@joshuakb2]

This video came into my feed just a couple days after I used exactly this method to collect some data from a website. Very good info! This is much easier than web scraping. Unfortunately, in my case, the data I could get out of the API was incomplete, and each item in the response contained a URL to a page with the rest of the info I needed, so I had to write some code to fetch each of those pages and scrape the info I needed. But much easier than having to scrape the initial list, as well.

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Thanks! I’m glad it helped in some way. I often find that a combination of many different methods is needed to get the end result

[@ERol-du3rd]

Awesome advice, a lot of people skip checking the requests when building scrapers but it can save a lot of time when it works

[@michelramon5786]

I was like "hm, okay, yeah" to "HOLY SHIT, THATS THE DOPEST SHIT I'VE EVER SEEN" I'm starting to get into this niche and I intend to learn more Python and SQL (you know, Data Analysis stuff/jobs) and I'm doing a project to scrape NBA statistics but there are always some errors and it ends up taking a long time. BUT THIS IS GOLD CONTENT, KEEP IT UP

[@vinny723]

Great tutorial. My screen scrapping job went from 4.5 hours to 8 minutes!!!!!

[@ThijmenCodes]

Nice video! Used a similar method to collect European Court of Human Rights case documents since there is no official API. Glad to see such methods gaining popularity online, it’s so useful!

[@eakerz5642]

Tnx :) Went from 1 hour scraping with Selenium to 1 minute just getting the JSONs.

[@wp4297]

HUGE! I've been looking for this info for 2 days. 12 mins of your video better than anything else, by far. Thumbs up and thank you so much

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Thank you !!

[@wp4297]

@@JohnWatsonRooney you saved me a lot of time. I'm new to the topic, next days I'll take a look at you channel

[@sajayagopi]

I was struggling with selinium to extract a table from javascript website. This video saved so much time. Thank you

[@GLo-qc8rz]

OMG man, was searching for 3 hrs how to extract javascript data w/o complicated rendering and your vid gave a 3 second solution. thank you so much man

[@isaacmartinez442]

Wow I love this! I was able to do it!! I did have to adapt to my own situation but still. Thank you so much

[@aidanomalley8607]

Thank you, your videos has automated my job. All i need now is a AI cam of myself

[@fuad471]

really nice and helpful tips in an actual topic with a sight-pleasuring recording quality, thank you for your time and efforts.

[@mattimhiyasmith]

I have used the inspect with network method but wasn't aware of the copy as url method, thanks for that tip will save me a lot of time!

[@krims15]

Nice tutorial. But one important thing you haven't mentioned is that most of such APIs usually have some sort of authorization (based on headers, referrer, token, key, whitelist, etc.).

[@walteredmond7904]

Yeah for sure I work for MS and all apis are white listed. Wish I could access it as a Public User lol

[@maskettaman1488]

Some do. Most 'public' ones (eg. no account needed) will not. Even then figuring out what they do for auth is often trivial

[@maskettaman1488]

@@csharpminorflat5 They're not going to IP block someone for shopping on their site too much lmao

[@Al3xdude19]

@@maskettaman1488 I’ve been IP blocked for web scraping before. Then again, I didn’t purchase anything. I was taking the photos lol

[@maskettaman1488]

@@Al3xdude19 You have to REALLY deviate from normal behaviour to catch blocks like that lol. If you fire off requests as fast as possible then yeah you'll probably get caught

[@BOSS-AI-20]

This video is really amazing I learned web scraping from your videos thanks

[@ЦветанГергинов-с7ю]

There is always something new to learn. I’ve been spending hours to grind such an information by hand-writing the whole program to get my result ;D Thanks!

[@Oiympus]

nice tips, it's always fun to poke around and look at what data webpages are using

[@milosZcr]

Great content, very useful now that I am learning about this subject. You earned a new sub here

[@unknownuser993]

Wow that ‘generate code’ feature is super useful. Thanks!

[@glitchinLife]

Nice tutorial on scrapping, some tricks I have been using myself, and some others never heard of until now thx for sharing!!! Small adjustments if I may (please don't take this as criticism) I think you don't need to loop over each product to copy it to your res, you can use extend instead, also I think the header didn't change so you can take it out the loop over pages

[@huisopperman]

Thanks for sharing! This has helped me a lot. After struggling for weeks with selenium, I was able to apply this technique fairly quickly, and am now using it as source to scrape ETF-composition data to feed directly into a PowerBI dataset. Much appreciated!

[@sheikhakbar2067]

I always come to your channel for these excellent time-saving tips and tricks! Thank you!

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Glad you like them!

[@lucasmoratoaraujo8433]

Greetings from Brazil! Thank you! I just had to adjust some of the quote marks on the header (there were some 'chained' double quotes (like ""windows"")), making some of the header's strings be interpreted by python as code, not text. Just had to change inner double quotes for single quotes (e.g. "'windows'") and it worked perfectly!). Can't wait to try your other tutorials! Once more, thank your very much!

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Hey! Thank you! I’m glad you managed to get it work

[@phoenixflower1225]

This is seriously high level content right here

[@Josh-kw7zk]

Thank you so much for this tutorial. It helped me a lot on my project. And i learn a lot of new things that i didnt know. Thank you!

[@alexcalish9774]

Wow, I think this 1 tutorial will do the most to up level my scraping than I could have ever imagined. Bye bye selenium.

[@Davidca12]

This single-handedly cut the running time of my program from literal hours to a couple of minutes, cannot thank you enough!

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Brilliant, thanks!

[@krahkyn]

This is such useful content that shows how much value experience gives - thank you for the straightforward and realistic tutorial!

[@BIO5Error]

Very, very interesting - I'm going to give this a go myself. Cheers for another great video John.

[@JSaretin]

Instead of looping over the results again, you can use res.extend(products)

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Yes absolutely, thank you for sharing

[@codydabest]

This was nearly exactly my job back in 2014/2015 for a giant e-com shoe company. Was always nice when you'd come across a brand that included their inventory count in their API. But yes selenium/watir all day lol

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

I’m often quite surprised how much info you can easily get!

[@techkhid4836]

Thank you soooo much.....I needed THIS!

[@bigstupidtree3771]

This has saved me hours today. Genuinely, thank you. 🙇‍♂️

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

That’s great, thank you for watching!

[@mujeebishaque]

I love you, John. You're awesome! Thanks for being unique and producing quality content.

[@pascal831]

Thanks John! You are a lifesaver sir!

[@ninjahkz4078]

Lol, I hadn't thought of a possibility to get an api like that until now haha ​​thanks a lot!

[@davida99]

Wow! I just found a gem of a channel! Love your content!

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Thanks appreciated!!

[@rameshks5281]

Easy to understand and very neat & clean narration. Keep it up 🙂

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Thanks a lot 😊

[@klabauter-ev4ix]

That was incredibly helpful and exactly what I needed today. Your presentation is very clear. Thank you!

[@ScottCov]

John Great Video...Thanks for taking the time to do this!!!

[@phoenixflower1225]

Thank you so much - this is so insightful and educational. Really helped me understand so many things in so little time.

[@Moiludi]

Thank you! It provided a new way of thinking at the issue of collecting data. 🙏

[@RatoCanguru_Lucas]

Man, this is gold. Thanks for sharing!

[@davidl3383]

brillant, i start to do that and it's very effective. Good chanel and good job. Thank you John

[@MikeD-qx1kr]

John, a specific video about how to scrape React website would be nice. It uses a mix of html and JSON data on pages...just an idea. Keep up the good work loving it.

[@jawadch8723]

This feels illegal. And I love it!

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Haha

[@ChrisS-oo6fl]

Complete rookie here. I’m trying to understand scraping to help access my lap times from the mylaps api utilizing my own interface. This is intimidating for a novice like me.

[@inspecteurbane5666]

Thanks a lot, very interesting video, i learned so many things that i didn't know. I will come back for sure!

[@voinywolnyprod3046]

Quite interesting! Thank you so much for showing such nice tricks, gonna get familiar with Insomnia.

[@Jiloh5]

It worked like charm! I really needed this. Thanks

[@muhammadrehan3030]

Thank you for such a wonderful videos. I learned a lot from you. BTW your video quality and background are always very beautiful.

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

thanks! it's nice of you to mention video quality and background, i do my best!

[@irfanshaikh262]

John, you make scraping interesting and motivating simultaneously. Good that I found your channel P. S. I lost myself it at 0:10😂

[@TheEkkas]

Such a nice vid, if there was a VPN add, I didn't even notice it!

[@edgarasben]

This is amazing! So many things I didn’t know.

[@Rob-ky1ob]

Instead of looping over the list and doing an append of each individual item, you can do list().extend(list()) which extends the list with the new list. The result of this is 1 list of dictionaries (basically an identical result to how you did it) but with less and cleaner code.

[@lokeshchowdary7487]

Thank you for making this awesome tutorial.

[@sakibullah3577]

really nice juicy piece of knowledge. this XRH tab changes the game hopefully however there arise an issue of how to tackle the cookie-expire problem and if the api needs JWT token, private key

[@mrklopp1029]

Thank you for those videos. They're extremely helpful. Keep up the good work! 🙂

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Glad you like them!

[@vintprox]

DevTools is a swiss knife for this kind of reverse engineering! It never gets old for me.

[@lagu1ful]

thank you for the information that you have explained, this is very helpful for the research I am doing

[@lagu1ful]

thank you so much

[@RS-Amsterdam]

You made/make stepping into scraping and developing, easy and fun . Thanks for sharing !!

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Thank you!

[@bronxandbrenx]

My master in data extraction.

[@ernestomacias5192]

Well it sure is alot better then what API pulling I had to do in my last job it was nothing short of a nightmare.

[@shaikusman536]

John brother your content is Amazing..........Pls improve audio quality...Respect from INDIA.

[@amirahmed5905]

Hi there, I found your channel where each and every video delicately made for web scrapping and automation which helps me a lot as work with web scraping and web automation. I have a request, if possible then please make python data post methods on Stateful api v1 and how to mimic cookies and session to get the job done. Thank you.

[@giovannimilana6428]

Huge thanks this video was a game changer for me!

[@ericbwertz]

Nice video -- perfect level of detail.

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Thanks

[@elliotnyberg9332]

This is amazing and will help me alot. Thank you!!

[@swaidaslam8266]

Wow, just did not know something like that existed. Thanks :)

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

That’s great thanks for watching

[@xXEnigmaXx001]

This works in a lot of cases were the API is open. However, in cases like Social Media Platforms were you have to have an account to access the API or a Wordpress Websites were the API is turned off it wont work. The best approach in these situations, is really just to use Selenium or anything close and try to crawl the pages with a delay.

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Yea as you say anything that needs a login is much more tricky, in some cases you can pass the cookie and headers around and maintain the session but sometimes selenium/playwright is the best option

[@Adam-xr6fj]

I used to do this in PHP without knowing better. Nice to see how it's done in python.

[@epicman9105]

you're so goated for this

[@tobias2688]

Hi John, I loved the video so much that I had to join Patreon to subscribe there to you. Thanks!

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Hey! Thank you very much!

[@xSamsung7]

I didn't knew that is so simple.I think I make everything much harder for me hah. Thank you!

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

this is a simpler example, on other sites you need to include the cookies and appropriate headers but the process is the same!

[@xSamsung7]

@@JohnWatsonRooney I think that method doesnt work with site i’m trying to scrape prices from. They are using PHP to include product info :/ No API seen in Network page

[@numbah16]

The king runs Libre

[@lazyboi749]

It surprises me that a company as large as SunglassHut doesn’t have some basic CORS protection for their API. Regardless, great video mate!

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Thanks, I was surprised too!

[@markusjohnsson4836]

They might have CORS. CORS protects against browsers doing requests to your API from client code of other websites. It does not protect against scraping scripts.

[@lazyboi749]

@@markusjohnsson4836 That’s a good point. Although, him using that Postman interface proved they don’t implement CORS.

[@dukesteen]

@@lazyboi749 No it doesn't, CORS only prevents the *browser* from making requests, you can use any other tool just fine, you can also use a cors everywhere proxy to access the api anyways if they did implement cors.

[@markusjohnsson4836]

@@lazyboi749 while I don’t personally use Postman, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t enforce CORS stuff.

[@XAUDERINO]

dude you save my live in my thesis work ;-; ty

[@rahulkmail]

Nice tutorial

[@agsantiago22]

Great video! Thanks so much for sharing! I think you should consider some academic research program (if you havent't already). I am sure you would do an amazing work. Congrats and thanks again!

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Thanks for watching I’m glad you enjoyed it!

[@PatoToledo23]

I was using this too and burp suite to have more control in some times

[@strum6651]

This is good when an API prevents you from requesting too much data, but in the example you give (sun glass website), you can just set pageSize to totalProducts, making your code fit in one request and less traffic to the website.

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Yes absolutely somehow I missed that when doing this!

[@joe-skeen]

I guess this also depends on if you want to be a good neighbor... Requesting too much data at once, if the API is poorly designed, could overwhelm the server and take it down

[@strum6651]

@@joe-skeen This can be both ways, but I would always assume that the server prefers less traffic directed to it.

[@tubelessHuma]

This is very useful trick John. 💖

[@randyallen8610]

Great content. Thanks for this video

[@nadyamoscow2461]

Clear and helpful as usual. Thanks a lot!!

[@TypicallyThomas]

Thanks so much. This makes things a lot easier

[@JohnWatsonRooney]

Great to hear!