My Actor 2

A Python template for scraping data from a single web page. Provide a URL via input, and the actor fetches the HTML, parses it, and stores the extracted data in a dataset. The example extracts page headings, but you can modify the code to target any elements.

Key Features

• Apify SDK for Python: Toolkit for building Apify Actors.
• Input Schema: Validates the actor's configuration input.
• HTTPX: Makes asynchronous HTTP requests to fetch web pages.
• Beautiful Soup: Parses and extracts data from HTML/XML.
• Dataset Storage: Stores structured output where each item has the same attributes.
• Request Queue: Holds URLs to be scraped (for extending functionality).

How to Use

Input

The actor requires an input object containing the target URL. Configure this via the actor's input schema in the Apify Console.

{
  "url": "https://example.com"
}

Process

1. The actor retrieves the input URL via Actor.get_input().
2. It fetches the page HTML using httpx.AsyncClient().get(url).
3. The HTML is parsed with Beautiful Soup: BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'lxml').
4. The script extracts data (e.g., headings) using Beautiful Soup methods. You can edit the parsing logic.
   python for heading in soup.find_all(["h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6"]): # Extraction logic here
5. Extracted data is stored via Actor.push_data() into the actor's default dataset.

Output

The scraped data is saved in the actor's dataset. You can view, export, or access it via the Apify API. The default output format (for headings) is a list of objects, each containing the heading text and tag name.

Getting Started

Run on Apify Platform

1. Build the actor from this template in your Apify Console.
2. Configure the input with your target URL.
3. Run the actor and retrieve the data from the dataset tab.

Local Development

Pull the actor to your machine using the Apify CLI for local development:

1. Install the CLI:
   ```bash
   # Using Homebrew
   brew install apify-cli

   Using NPM

   npm -g install apify-cli
   2. Pull the actor using its unique name or ID (found in the Apify Console):bash
   apify pull
   ```

Resources

• BeautifulSoup Scraper
• Python tutorials in Academy
• Apify SDK for Python documentation
• Input schema documentation
• Web scraping with Beautiful Soup and Requests