Skill
Web Scraping
jamditis
Pulls data off web pages that don't hand it over cleanly - cascading through fallback fetch strategies and coping with 403s, CAPTCHAs, and rate limits, while validating every URL and treating whatever comes back as untrusted. It is a disciplined way to ACQUIRE raw data from the live web, not a tool for analyzing, charting, or synthesizing what you collect.
Situations it fits
You need a current list of all product pages and prices from a dozen competitor storefronts that don’t offer an API, and some storefronts block automated requests.A reporter needs every city-council meeting date and its agenda link from a municipal site that lists them across dozens of paginated pages, collected into one clean table.A marketing leader asks you to build a nightly process that collects product availability from multiple vendor websites that sometimes return a blank page or temporarily block your bot IPs.6 scenarios in the bank answer to Web Scraping. The rest are in the game.
Skills it gets confused with
These share a family with Web Scraping, which is another way of saying they are the ones you might reach for by mistake.
- Chart DesignerTurns a prepared dataset into the right visualization - choosing an appropriate chart…
- Deep ResearchInvestigates an open-ended question by gathering evidence across many websites and…
- Exploratory Data AnalysisProfiles a dataset you already have - distributions, missingness, outliers, leakage, and…
Knowing what Web Scraping does is the easy half. Telling it apart from the others under time pressure is the game.
Today's sessionWeb Scraping is part of jamditis/claude-skills-journalism. Licence: MIT. The description above was written for this game, not taken from the skill.