Jchamo/extractly-web-data-extraction-in-plain-english

Extractly 🕸️

Turn Any Webpage Into a Spreadsheet Using Plain English

No code. No browser extensions. No local installs. Just paste a URL, describe what you want, and download your CSV.

Try It In 10 Seconds

Paste any of these into the app to see it in action:

Who Is This For?

• —Researchers who need data from a webpage without writing Python
• —Journalists who want to turn a table or list into a spreadsheet
• —Product managers who want competitor pricing or feature lists
• —Data enthusiasts who know what they want but not how to get it
• —QA engineers exploring NLP-driven browser automation

How It Works

You describe it → AI identifies the structure → Playwright extracts it → You download the CSV

1. 1.Paste a URL — any publicly accessible webpage
2. 2.Describe what you want in plain English — "Extract the title and price of each product" — "Get the author, quote, and tags from each entry"
3. 3.Extractly navigates the page server-side using a headless Chromium browser — no extension needed
4. 4.An LLM analyzes the page structure and identifies the right CSS selectors automatically
5. 5.Your data appears as a clean preview table with a one-click CSV download

Under the Hood: Advanced Extraction Engineering

Extractly isn't just a simple raw HTML scraper. It employs several advanced runtime engineering mechanisms to ensure selector stability and high extraction accuracy:

• —DFS Accessibility Tree Serialization: Performs a Depth-First Search (DFS) traversal of the Chrome Accessibility Tree via direct Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) sessions. This preserves semantic reading order and document hierarchy, preventing token truncation and layout-ordering issues.
• —Semantic Text Hoisting: Automatically hoists text content from inner StaticText and InlineTextBox child nodes to their parent semantic elements, providing full contextual layout info to the LLM.
• —Self-Correcting Selector Guards:
• —Absolute Selector Stripping: Sanitizes selectors to prevent the LLM from generating brittle absolute selector paths.
• —Parent Self-Match Auto-Correction: Detects if a relative sub-field selector matches the card container itself. Automatically falls back to query narrower sub-elements (e.g. .author, small, .tags, .price) to prevent retrieving the entire card block.
• —List & Tag Formatting: Detects fields representing multiple inline tags or categories. Automatically cleanses label text (removing prefixes like "by " or "(about)"), strips formatting whitespace, and joins items into a single-line comma-separated string.
• —Main Link & Utility Filtering: Discriminates utility links (like category tags, upvotes, flags, or comments) from the primary destination URL to guarantee correct outbound links.

What Makes This Different

Most scraping tools require either coding knowledge or expensive subscriptions. Extractly fills the gap:

Privacy & Compliance

• —robots.txt viewer built in — check a site's scraping guidelines before you extract
• —SSRF protection — private IPs and localhost are blocked server-side
• —No data retention — extracted data lives only in your session and is never stored
• —Users are responsible for ensuring their use complies with target site terms of service

Tech Stack

Local Development

Prerequisites

• —Python 3.11
• —Groq API key — free at console.groq.com

Setup

git clone https://github.com/joshchamo/extractly.git
cd extractly
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
playwright install chromium

Run

export GROQ_API_KEY="your-key-here"
uvicorn app.main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 7860

Open http://localhost:7860

Limitations

• —Single page only — pagination is not yet supported
• —JavaScript-heavy SPAs may require additional load time
• —Results depend on page structure — highly dynamic or obfuscated sites may not extract cleanly
• —Respects a 20 second navigation timeout per page

Built with FastAPI + Playwright + Groq. Part of an ongoing series of AI automation tools.

Developer: Josh Chamo · [joshchamo@gmail.com](mailto:joshchamo@gmail.com) [GitHub Repository](https://github.com/joshchamo/extractly)