These three modes are often used in Cloud Extraction to speed up the extraction process. Click here to see an example.įixed List, List of URLs, and Text List are all used to make a list with a certain number of items. To help you get started working with XPath, this section will help you to build a basic understanding of XPath quickly and introduce its application in the web scraping tool, Octoparse. Text List Mode is used when you need to enter different text values, for example, entering different keywords in the searching box. It can be used when you have many pages with similar formats like Amazon product detail pages. List of URLs is to make a list of URLs for Octoparse to browse one by one. The items added to the list will not change even in dynamic pages. Click here to see an example.įixed List is opposite to Variable List as it can not automatically add new items but just add items according to the fixed list of XPath you enter the box. Single Element is to locate just one single item matched with an XPath, especially to normal pagination by loop clicking a button. But when you choose the Variable List mode for your. In most cases, Octoparse V6.2 will extract web elements by an absolute XPath when you create a loop for your task using Advanced Mode. That’s why the relative XPath appears when you want to modify XPath for data fields. That is what Variable List Mode can do for you! Every time there are new tweets shown, Octoparse will automatically add them to the list right away. A: The Loop Mode for Wizard Mode (List/Table) is the Variable List mode. So you need to keep adding new tweets shown on the page to the loop list. For example, there will be more tweets on the same twitter page if you keep scrolling down to the bottom of the screen. It is widely used to locate items in a similar layout, especially when dealing with dynamic websites because Variable List Mode will automatically detect and match all the items corresponding to a certain XPath.
6.2 Clink on the pagination box and update the Xpath on the right half. Variable List is the most frequently used loop mode in Octoparse. Octoparse provides pre-built templates for scraping Walmart, Amazon, Etsy.
There are actually 5 loop modes in Octoparse: Variable List, Single Element, Fixed List, List of URLs, and Text List. The updated version of this tutorial (based on the latest webpage) is available now.