Writing Recipes with Recipe Creator

Recipe Creator is a feature inside Data Miner that allows you to create your own recipes for any website. In this sections you will learn about Recipe Creator basics, selecting rows, selecting columns and Next Page Pagination. Watch the videos below to begin.

Intro and Row Selector Video

Creating rows is an important step in scraping data. It tells Data Miner how to organize your output file. This step must be done before creating columns. Rows are not required when creating Detail Recipes. Watch the video below to learn how to open Recipe creator and create rows using the Easy Row Finder tool. For Detail recipes continue to Column Selector video below.

* For tips on using the Advanced Finder please watch the video towards the bottom of this page.

Page Set-Up Video optional

Some pages will require additional automation such as clicking a button or scrolling to the bottom of a page in order to scrape the data.
The following video will show you how to set up some example page-set up automation.
*Requires a paid plan

Column Selector Video

Creating columns is the step where you tell Data Miner what data you want to extract. Watch the video below to learn how to create columns using the Easy Row Finder tool.

* For tips on using the Advanced Finder please watch the video towards the bottom of this page.

Nav Selector Video

Nav or Next Page Pagination is what allows the recipe to click to the next page and automatically scrape the data. This feature must be added to a recipe before it can work and Nav can only be added to List page recipes.

* For tips on using the Advanced Finder please watch the video towards the bottom of this page.

Advanced Finder Video

When sites have more complex HTML or the Easy Finder process is not working you may need to use our Advanced Finder tool. This tool allows you to manually choose selectors and type in custom code to make your selectors more powerful.

Modify Columns Video

You have data that needs clean up such as removing a "mailto:" prefix or if you need to split a name use the Modify options.
*Requires a paid plan

Try on your own!

Using our Practice Sandbox try running through the above steps on your own!

Advanced Custom Selectors:
Selectors Example Meaning
(Space) .industry strong Separate selectors by a space to travel down elements.
, h2, p Commas combine elements into one column. So the h2 tag data and the p tag data will be in the same column.
~ span~ Selects all the next elements as long as they all have the same parent or container.
+ span+ Selects the next one element as long as they have the same parent tag or container.
:contains(" ") div:contains("Email") Recipe Creator will find the word inside quotations for any div tag on the page and select it.
:first h2:first Recipe Creator will always find the first h2 tag on the page and select it.
:last h2:last Recipe Creator will always find the last h2 tag on the page and select it.
:eq() h2:eq(2) Recipe Creator will always find the second h2 tag on the page and select it. Recipe Creator can find any number as long as there are that many on the page. (Use eq() only when numbering will be consistent between pages)
:has(" ") div:has("p.address") Recipe Creator will find all the divs that have the p tag and the address class. Combine with :eq() to specify which div.
[selector="value"] [itemdrop="address"] When classes or tags aren't available but sites have alternative attributes in the HTML. Use them inside square brackets for your selectors.
class tag .address span When the parent container has the class, but you need data inside a child element. Select the suggested class of the parent and then type the tag containing the data with a space in-between.