Wget is a computer program which derives from world wide web and get, which retrieves content from web servers that support downloading with HTTP, FTP, and HTTPS. Wget also supports proxies and conversion of links for offline viewing of local HTML.it also work well on unstable connection helping to get documents until fully retrieved. Proxy servers help to lighten the speedup of retrieval, provides access to firewalls and also lighten the network load.
Since Wget is non-interactive, it can work well in the background while not logged in allowing the retrieval of data without losing any information.
Examples of Wget web scraping
Wget can handle much and complex situations including recursive downloads, non-interactive downloads, large files downloads and also multiple file downloads. The examples listed below will help in reviewing the various use of Wget.
-
Downloading multiple files
Before downloading multiple files, we need to create a file with all the URLs then use the parameter ‘-l’ and enter the URLs using a single line. The -l url.txt will download the mentioned files in the URL, one after another.
-
Downloading a file in background
If you want to download and move a huge file in the background, you can do this by using ‘-b’ parameter then the file will be saved offline.
-
Downloading single file
To download a single file, we use the Nagios core in the system during the download to see the percentage completed, the number of bites used to download, the time remaining for the download and the current speed used.
-
Getting the directory of a site in an HTML file
You can know the directory listing from a site and store it offline. All you need is to use these commands; Wget FTP URL which will lead to HTML.
-
Command to check & fetch a new version of a file.
After downloading the file, you can check with the server the newest version available and users to utilize the Wget timestamp commands. Sometimes the timestamp can miss from the website but no need to worry because it will fetch the file.
-
Downloading limit if you are unsure of the file size
This helps when you have no idea of the file size and mostly not on a metered connection. You can always download whenever the limits reset. In this example, the Q1m alerts that the download will stop after 1 MB of the file has downloaded.
-
Download of a file which retries the connection multiple times when disconnected
This happens whenever initiating a download but ensure the network connectivity thus automating the retries by using the command which is basically trying to download remotely. The Wget –tries=115< or URL -of -the – file&get can be applied.
-
Downloading a file that requires a specific referral domain
To mock the referral domain a downloading the file, the use of Wget command can be used on some promotional files to download the specified referral domain.
The shortlisted covered examples are most useful commands that can be easily used to command Wget. This is a free software utility that is user-friendly.
How to be Nice to the Serve When Using Wget web Scraper
Wget scraper is a spider that scrapes web pages. Unfortunately, some web pages may block these spiders using robots files attributes. You can manage to ignore the robots successfully by adding a switch to all your Wget commands.
If the web pages are blocking the Wget web scraping request by looking at the agent string of the user, you should fake that using a switch. For example –user-agent=Mozilla
Using Wget web scraping tool puts more strain on the website’s server
