Scrape the selected dropdown option as a field
FollowA dropdown menu is a list of options that only appears when the user clicks on a piece of text or a button. It is often used for websites to offer a range of choices.
At times you may want to actually scrape the selected dropdown option as an individual data field, for example when the drop-down options entail category information. In this article, we'll take a quick look at the different ways you can capture data on a drop-down list.
In Octoparse, we can either scrape the option values directly like any other data field on the webpage or scrape them from the loop item.
1. Scrape the option value directly like any other data field on the webpage
For this example, we are going to use a drown-drop list from MyCarInfo to show you how this is done.
- Click the dropdown menu box
- Select Loop through the options in the dropdown menu to set up a Switch Dropdown loop
- Click the dropdown menu box again
- Select Extract text of the selected element
- Tick Extract data in the loop and click Apply
We can iterate through the options in the loop list and click Extract data to check if we get the selected dropdown option in the data preview section.
2. Scrape the option value using a loop item
If in some cases the option value won't change even when they are selected, we'll need to scrape the option value using a loop item.
- Click the dropdown menu box to set up a Switch Dropdown loop
- Add an Extract Data action inside the loop
- Tick Extract data in the loop and click Apply
- Click the dropdown menu and select the SELECT tag and then the first OPTION
- Click Extract the text of the element
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Author: Crix
Editor: Isabel
