Extracting the goldmine of information out there on the web has been made possible by the advancement of web scraping technologies. While setting up a crawler to scrape data from a website needs strong technical knowledge, things can get even more complicated when the website in question is not in a language that you’re familiar with. Often, you might want to extract data from a Chinese or Japanese website but lack the time, patience and technical know-how to go about doing it. We have undertaken the extraction of Chinese and Japanese text from various websites for our clients and are familiar with the nuances of this use case.
Challenges in scraping Chinese and Japanese text
There are several factors that make extracting Chinese and Japanese text a challenging project. Here are the challenges that we have overcome:
Language barrier
Both Japanese and Chinese languages can be extremely difficult to interpret for non-natives and understanding the various data points on the website can pose a significant challenge. While Google Translate can aid in translating the complete webpage to English, the translation process can still hinder the speed and efficiency. Using a translation service is essential to setting up a crawler to scrape Chinese and Japanese text, which will definitely take more time.
Inconsistencies in encoding
Most websites use the UTF-8 encoding and this includes Chinese and Japanese sites too. However, we have encountered some cases where the website had characters that weren’t part of the declared encoding. While this isn’t a common scenario, such cases would require identification of the correct encoding and post processing, if necessary.
Geo-blocking
Some websites have geo-blocking enabled to allow only visitors from the home country. This will restriction might demand using a proxy service to crawl the site if you are scraping the site from a different geolocation.
Forget the challenges in scraping Chinese or Japanese text
At PromptCloud, we have a mature web scraping infrastructure that can cater to a host of use cases demanding a wide range of customizations. Add our years of expertise in the field of web data extraction and you get the best data from the web that technology can fetch you. A managed service will provide seamless access to high quality data while you are focused on the application in your core business functions.
If you are looking to scrape Japanese or Chinese text from websites, you can reach out to us with your requirements.