Extracting Text from Website

[allsquare]

Basically i'm merging one website into another existing website.

Wondered if there was a "magical" tool that could extract text from the pages of the old site so that i could easily copy & paste them into the new site?

 

[Paul Pitchford]

I've not used it myself but a client asked for something similar and I think he got on ok with this: webscraper.io

The video on their homepage looks quite informative.

HTH!

 

[webgeek]

Are the old pages pure html or are they created from a database using php/mysql or other similar tech?

If the former, you could use ftp or any mirroring software like winhttrack to pull down and archive all the files locally then ftp upload them to the new site.

If you could neatly plop that site in a subfolder on the new site, you wouldn't have nearly as much a task of updating any links. There are some easy free tools that will search all files and replace a string.

 

[Barry O'Neill]

you could ask a developer to run a special qwuery on the existing database to pull out certain posts and pages you're after

 

[sipexa]

If your site is based on wordpress, you can export and later import the content to another site.

 

[Clinton]

you could use...winhttrack...

...There are some easy free tools that will search all files and replace a string.

Does he need another tool? If I remember correctly, winhttrack offers the option to modify links to make them absolute / make other path changes. But it's been a while since I used the software.

 

[UKcentric]

How is your existing site built and how many pages are there? The options for extracting the data totally depend on that.

Assuming you have no access to the site files or Content Management System, you would have to scrape the site. Scraping means using a piece of software to grab text from all or parts of each page.

http://www.httrack.com/ is a piece of software which will download the whole site to your local computer, as raw HTML files. The user interface leaves a lot to be desired and can be confusing for beginners.

There are many browser extensions available for Chrome, Firefox etc. which will scrape pages. Go to the Google Chrome Web Store and search for "scraper".

If there are only a few pages then the quickest and easiest way would be to copy and paste the text by hand.

 

[Craig Bird]

UKCentric's suggestion is spot on, use Httrack to scrape the site.