A Scraper is a template telling OutWit how to extract information from a page.
When 'tables', 'lists' or 'guess' do not manage to recognize automatically the structure of a page and extract its data, you still have the option to create a Scraper and tell OutWit how it should handle this specific URL (or all the pages of a given Web site, a sub-section thereof, etc).
A scraper is simply a list of the fields you want to recognize and extract. For each field, it specifies the name of the field (ex.: 'Phone Number'), the strings located immediately before and after the data to extract in the source code of the page and the format of the data to extract for this field. The pro version also allows you to set replacement string to alter the extracted data and a delimiter, to split the extracted result into several fields.
The scrapers view can contain either the scraper manager (to create, duplicate, delete previously made scrapers), or the scraper editor, to build and edit them.
In editing mode, the source code of the current page is displayed, for you to easily identify and copy the markers you need. In the right or bottom part of the window is the editor itself, where you can create and modify your scrapers.
To switch from one mode to the other, use the Manage or Edit button.
In the scraper manager, the 'active' checkboxes determine whether a scraper should be used when the corresponding URL is loaded. When unchecked, the scraper is deactivated.
When asked to scrape a page, if there are more than one applicable active scrapers for that URL, OutWit will apply the one that seems most appropriate and recent, using several criteria (version number, modification time, specificity of the 'URL contains' string, etc.).
In the light version, only one scraper can be active at a given time and no more than ten scrapers can be present in the manager.
From both the manager and the editor, you can apply the scraper to the current page, using the 'Execute' button (or the right-click menu, in the manager). After performing an extraction with a scraper, you will find your results in the scraped data view.