Author Profile

Mihnea-Octavian Manolache

Full Stack Developer

Mihnea-Octavian Manolache is a Full Stack and DevOps Engineer at WebScrapingAPI, building product features and maintaining the infrastructure that keeps the platform running smoothly.

Python web scrapingproxy infrastructurebrowser automationanti-bot resilienceGuidesScience of Web ScrapingUse Cases
Mihnea-Octavian Manolache, Full Stack Developer @ WebScrapingAPI

Published Articles

20

Published Articles
GuidesApr 29, 202610 min read

Scrapy vs Beautiful Soup: Which Python Scraper to Pick

TL;DR: Scrapy is a full crawling framework that handles requests, parsing, and data export in one package. Beautiful Soup is a lightweight parsing library you pair with an HTTP client like requests. Choose Scrapy when you need large-scale, concurrent crawling with built-in pipelines. Choose Beautiful Soup when you want a fast, minimal setup for parsing a handful of pages.

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Use CasesMay 1, 202615 min read

Alternative Data Scraping for Finance: How Web Data Gives Investors an Edge

TL;DR: Alternative data scraping uses web collection techniques to gather non-traditional datasets (product pricing, sentiment, job postings, regulatory filings) that reveal market signals before they appear in earnings reports. This guide walks you through the highest-value data sources, how to build financial-grade pipelines, data quality validation, and the compliance guardrails you need to stay on the right side of the law.

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GuidesApr 22, 20269 min read

Web Scraping API Quick Start Guide

Get started with WebScrapingAPI, the ultimate web scraping solution! Collect real-time data, bypass anti-bot systems, and enjoy professional support.

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GuidesApr 30, 202616 min read

Bypass Cloudflare with Selenium: 5 Python Methods (2026)

TL;DR: Cloudflare blocks vanilla Selenium by fingerprinting the browser, inspecting headers, and analyzing behavioral signals. This guide walks through five practical bypass methods (Undetected ChromeDriver, Selenium Stealth, SeleniumBase UC mode, CAPTCHA-solver integration, and scraping APIs), complete with Python code, a comparison table, and a troubleshooting runbook so you can pick the right approach for your scale and budget.

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GuidesMay 2, 202634 min read

Puppeteer Download File: 4 Methods for Node.js

TL;DR: A Puppeteer download file workflow has four good shapes: click a button and let Chrome write to a folder you control, run fetch() inside the page and pipe base64 back to Node, drive the Chrome DevTools Protocol with download progress events, or skip the browser and pull the URL with Axios using cookies harvested from the Puppeteer session. Pick by file size, auth, and how the site exposes the link.

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GuidesMay 1, 202611 min read

How to Use a Proxy in Node-Fetch: A Practical Guide

TL;DR: Node-Fetch has no built-in proxy switch, so you wire an HTTP, HTTPS, or SOCKS5 agent into the request through its agent option. This guide walks through how to use a proxy in Node-Fetch end to end: authenticated HTTP and HTTPS proxies, SOCKS5, rotation, retries, TLS edge cases, troubleshooting, and the modern undici route for Node 18+ native fetch.

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GuidesApr 28, 202613 min read

Playwright Web Scraping: Guide for Python and Node.js

TL;DR: Playwright gives you full browser automation for scraping JavaScript-heavy sites, with first-class support for both Python and Node.js. This guide walks you through installation, element extraction, proxy configuration, anti-detection, pagination, image downloads, and exporting data to CSV or JSON, all with side-by-side code examples in both languages.

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GuidesMay 8, 202612 min read

Puppeteer Submit Form: Node.js Guide for 2026

TL;DR: Use page.locator(selector).fill(value) for fast, deterministic Puppeteer submit form scripts and page.type() when the page watches for real keystrokes (autocomplete, anti-bot, live validation). Submit by clicking the button, pressing Enter, or calling form.requestSubmit(), and always wait for a concrete success signal instead of a fixed timeout.

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GuidesMay 12, 202610 min read

How to Build a Web Scraper with Pyppeteer (2026 Guide)

TL;DR: Pyppeteer is the unofficial Python port of Puppeteer and still works for driving a real Chromium from asyncio. In this guide you will install it, write a modern web scraper with Pyppeteer using asyncio.run and try/finally, handle waits, forms, screenshots, infinite scroll, cookies, and proxies, and learn when to migrate to Playwright, Selenium, or a hosted scraping API.

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Science of Web ScrapingApr 28, 202626 min read

15 Best Antidetect Browsers in 2026 - Honest Comparison

TL;DR: Antidetect browsers let you run multiple isolated browser profiles, each with a unique fingerprint, so platforms cannot link your accounts. This guide ranks the 15 best antidetect browsers of 2026 across fingerprint quality, automation support, pricing, and proxy integration. We also cover how these tools actually work, when a scraping API is the smarter choice, and which proxy type to pair with each use case.

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Science of Web ScrapingMay 8, 20269 min read

What Are ISP Proxies? Guide for Web Scraping and Automation

TL;DR: What are ISP proxies? They are static residential IPs hosted in a datacenter. Detection systems see a residential ASN; you get datacenter throughput. They are the right pick when sessions, account binding, and predictable per-IP pricing matter more than raw geographic reach.

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GuidesApr 30, 202613 min read

How to Bypass Cloudflare in 2026: Tools, Code & Tactics

TL;DR: Cloudflare blocks scrapers by layering TLS fingerprinting, JavaScript challenges, behavioral analysis, and Turnstile CAPTCHAs into a composite trust score. To bypass Cloudflare reliably, you need to match every layer simultaneously. This guide covers the detection stack, compares four practical tools (Nodriver, SeleniumBase UC, Camoufox, curl-impersonate), and walks through proxy strategies, session persistence, error troubleshooting, and production scaling.

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GuidesMay 1, 202618 min read

Python Headless Browser Libraries For Web Scraping in 2026

TL;DR: A Python headless browser lets you render JavaScript, click through SPAs, and scrape sites that plain HTTP clients can't reach. Selenium is the safest default, Playwright is the modern pick for new code, Pyppeteer and Splash still have niche uses, and a hosted browser API is what you reach for when anti-bot defenses or scale start to bite.

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GuidesMay 12, 202615 min read

Axios Set Headers in 2026: The Developer Playbook

TL;DR: Axios set headers across five layers, per-request config, global defaults, axios.create() instances, request and response interceptors, and the response itself. This guide walks each layer with runnable v1 snippets, then fixes the four bugs that bite everyone: multipart boundaries, CORS cookies, self-signed certs, and header casing.

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GuidesApr 22, 202611 min read

Top 3 Python HTTP Clients for Web Scraping

Discover the best python HTTP clients for 2022 and spin up your own web scraper in under X lines of code.

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GuidesApr 22, 20269 min read

How To Use CURL With Python For Web Scraping

Discover How To Use CURL With Python for web scraping and build a simple web scraping app in literally minutes.

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GuidesApr 22, 20264 min read

8 Best Web Scraping Tools: Scrape the Web to Grow your Business

Do you want to know the scrape web importance and how it can help you to outperform your competitors? If yes, then you’re in the right place!

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GuidesApr 22, 202610 min read

Data Scraping Apps : A New Solution to Retrieve Valuable Data from Multiple Websites

Data scraping apps extract valuable information from the web into the local files of the computer system.

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GuidesApr 22, 202611 min read

How Site Scrapers Work (And Best Scrapers in 2023)

Using a site scraper is one of the best ways to collect your desired data from the web. This article tells you how to do it, along with some tool recommendations.

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GuidesApr 22, 20269 min read

Niche Scraper Alternatives: 5 Best Tools For Product Scraping

Niche Scraper is a popular product scraping tool. Yet, there might be better solutions than this for various reasons. So, consider using one of these 5 Best Niche Scraper alternatives.

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