Oxylabs Launches Custom Parser

As we permanently strive to develop new product features to make our clients’ experience more enjoyable and the fruits of their work more rewarding, this time, we introduce Custom Parser. Being a free feature of Oxylabs Web Scraper API, Custom Parser allows you to set your own parsing instructions for any target. 

What can you do with Custom Parser? 

Custom Parser gives you more flexibility as more targets become available for parsing. Let’s take a look at the Custom Parser’s capabilities: 

• Parsing public data with the help of XPath and CSS expressions;

• Extracting all text from an HTML document;

• Manipulating strings with regex expressions and pre-defined functions;

• Performing common string actions like indexing, conversion, and retrieving the length;

• Doing mathematical calculations, like finding the maximum and minimum values, calculating the average, and multiplying values.

Who is Custom Parser suitable for? 

Let’s take a look at some instances when Custom Parser makes an optimal choice:

• If you want to parse data from the targets that don’t have a dedicated parser;

• If you can’t retrieve the information that you need with a dedicated parser;

• If you don’t want to or don’t have enough resources to implement and maintain an in-house scraping and parsing infrastructure.

Wrapping up

If you’re curious to try our new free feature, Custom Parser, head out to our documentation and this GitHub guide to learn the basics of creating custom parsing instructions in Python and to see Custom Parser in action.