Visual Web Ripper

There are many tools available for downloading content from a web site, but they will only help you get images and other media. Visual Web Ripper can do much more than that. It will harvest web sites and extract any content, including data structures. It is a bit more complex than other similar software, but it is still easy to use. If you need to extract more than just media files from a web site, this is the tool you should use.

If you want to try it out first, a trial version is available, which you can use without any limitations. The package is roughly 16 Mb large, so it may take an extra minute to download it if your Internet connection is not fast enough. Before starting the setup process, you should make sure you have MS .NET Framework 4 installed.

You may access a web site, just like you would in a browser, on Visual Web Ripper's interface. Just type the address or paste a URL in a dialog box, beneath the toolbar and the page will be loaded on the lower area of the interface. There are three separate boxes, above the page view, where you can set what type of content to extract, analyze it and make certain settings.

Unlike standard web browsers, the software does not let you navigate from one page to another by clicking the links on the page. This is where Visual Web Ripper is starting to get interesting. Any element on a web page, including images, links, text and so on, can be selected by clicking on them. The selected content is described in the Capture box. For example, if you select an image, its URL will be displayed in the Capture box. It is also possible to switch to an HTML view of the selected element in the same box.

After selecting something on the web page, you can opt to extract the element, its page attribute, fixed value, script or others. These can be selected from a drop menu in the Captured Elements box. A template must be created as well, in the same box. You can choose to capture a page area, a link and much more. These can also be selected from a drop menu.

There are many other features you can find if you take your time to study the interface. You can export data to Excel, SQL database, Oracle, OleDB, export it as C# or VB.NET script and more. There are many settings to make and it only takes little exploration to find them.