There are several video tutorials to turn to if you need any help there’s a detailed Overview webpage as well. You will quickly get accustomed to the interface and its panels. Little time and effort will go into installing FMiner on a Windows PC. There’s also a price difference between the two editions – the Pro one costs more.įMiner is just a properly good web scrapping tool that has a lot to offer. The difference is that FMiner Pro supports more output formats, features a handy scheduler and comes with the email report function. There are two FMiner editions to choose from: FMiner and FMiner Pro. If you have any problems getting accustomed to FMiner’s functionality, check out the online documentation and the video tutorials offered by the developer on the application’s official website. You will be able to collect data from any website you want and save it locally. This means you can use FMiner as a visual web scraper, efficient web extractor, screen scraper, and web crawler. On top of that, it has web macro functionality and diagram designer functionality to offer. That is, as mentioned above, the functionality FMiner has to offer: it is a web data extraction tool for web scraping and web screen scraping. After you get accustomed to the interface, you will be able to use it to extract data from any website you want. At the top, in the upper left hand side, you will see a traditional File Menu and buttons for various functions the application can perform. You will see several panels on the application's interface: the flowchart process map panel in the upper left hand side, a browser panel to the right, the Attribute panel in the lower left hand side, and the Input Output panel to the right. When you’re done with the installation and you run FMiner for the first time, you will be asked to choose one of two registration methods: “I use FMiner for the first time, I want to get a 15 days trial license” or “I have purchased a license, I will register it.” After that you will be presented with a Welcome prompt that invites you to create a new project, open a saved project, and check out some tutorials. To install FMiner on a Windows-powered PC, you will have to go through a simple, standard setup process: download an executable onto your machine, run said executable, follow the instructions a setup wizard presents. And speaking about functionality, it must be mentioned that FMiner features web scraping, web data extraction, screen scraping, web harvesting, web crawling and web macro functionality. With this application's functionality, you will be able to complete anything from simple to very complex web scraping projects. When you're done with configurations, it can stay hidden in the system tray and constantly be on the lookout for changes or errors.Anyone who is looking for a powerful, visual web scrapping tool to use on a Windows-powered machine, is very well advised to get FMiner. Taking everything into consideration, we can say that FMiner Professional is a practical scraping tool which does not really require a lot of effort on your behalf. However, progress is saved when the check is complete, and you can also do this manually to save data either to XLS or CSV formats. Schedule custom scraping eventsįurthermore, an implemented scheduler gives you the possibility to save and store data at given intervals of time, but sadly, with no option to receive notifications when changes or errors occur. All actions are monitored and displayed in a real-time updating log, with highlighted text to indicate either errors or successful attempts. When recording is done, you are free to arrange the way elements are triggered in the macro process, and even have them put to a test. They are simply triggered by hitting the “record” button which makes the application track your every interaction with the opened page. You mostly get to work with a set of macro commands that are available in a side panel. Up to five tabs can be accessed and filled with pages of interest. An integrated web browser is put at your disposal so that all work is concentrated in one place. With a well-organized interface composed of several data analysis sections that can be re-arranged, you come across no accommodation problems. With this in mind, the application is designed to make it all look easy. Cones with an integrated browserĪlthough contested by some websites as violating legal terms of privacy, the method is commonly used to gather data and stay up to date with changes, remaining perfectly legal. However, website verification and automatic data collectors have been here for a while, with FMiner Professional being a suitable example of these so-called web scraping applications. Since the Internet holds most of today's information and makes it available to anyone with an active connection, being up to date is slightly difficult.
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