Web Scraping in Java: Getting TV Show Data from Web Pages
Short answer
How do you get TV show information from web pages into Java?
Check for a public API first, such as TVmaze, which returns show data as JSON. If none covers your fields, fetch the page HTML and parse it with jsoup using CSS selectors, then map the results into Java objects. For JavaScript-rendered pages, fetch rendered HTML through AlterLab and parse it with jsoup.
Step by step
- 1
Look for an API
Structured APIs are faster and more stable than HTML parsing. Use them whenever they provide the fields you need.
- 2
Add jsoup
Add the org.jsoup:jsoup dependency with Maven or Gradle.
- 3
Fetch and select
Load the page with Jsoup.connect(url).get() and select elements with CSS selectors such as `h1.show-title`.
- 4
Map to objects
Convert each selected element into a record or POJO so the rest of your program works with typed data.
Example
import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
public class ShowScraper {
record Show(String title, String network) {}
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
Document doc = Jsoup.connect("https://example.com/shows/123").get();
Show show = new Show(
doc.selectFirst("h1.show-title").text(),
doc.selectFirst(".network").text()
);
System.out.println(show);
}
}Frequently Asked Questions
Is jsoup enough for every site?
jsoup parses HTML but does not run JavaScript. For pages that build their content in the browser, fetch the rendered HTML first and pass it to Jsoup.parse().
How do I avoid overloading the site?
Add a delay between requests, cache pages you have already fetched and respect robots.txt. Fetch only the pages you need.
Read the full guide
Java web scraping guideTry it with AlterLab
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