Other

This data type is universal and can be applied to any target. It accepts URLs along with additional parameters. You can find the list of available parameters in the table below.

Overview

Below is a quick overview of all the available data source values we support with other targets.

Source	Description	Structured data
universal	Submit any URL you like.	Use Custom Parser feature to get structured data.

Query parameters

Parameter	Description	Default Value
source	Data source. More info.	universal
url	Direct URL (link) to Universal page	N/A
user_agent_type	Device type and browser. The full list can be found here.	desktop
geo_location	Geo location of proxy used to retrieve the data. The complete list of the supported locations can be found here.	N/A
locale	Locale, as expected in the Accept-Language header.	N/A
render	Enables JavaScript rendering. More info.	N/A
content_encoding	Add this parameter if you are downloading images. Learn more here.	base64
context: content	Base64-encoded POST request body. It is only useful if http_method is set to post.	N/A
context: cookies	Pass your own cookies.	N/A
context: follow_redirects	Indicate whether you would like the scraper to follow redirects (3xx responses with a destination URL) to get the contents of the URL at the end of the redirect chain.	N/A
context: headers	Pass your own headers.	N/A
context: http_method	Set it to post if you would like to make a POST request to your target URL.	get
context: session_id	If you want to use the same proxy with multiple requests, you can do so by using this parameter. Just set your session to any string you like, and we will assign a proxy to this ID, and keep it for up to 10 minutes. After that, if you make another request with the same session ID, a new proxy will be assigned to that particular session ID.	N/A
context: successful_status_codes	Define a custom HTTP response code (or a few of them), upon which we should consider the scrape successful and return the content to you. May be useful if you want us to return the 503 error page or in some other non-standard cases.	N/A
callback_url	URL to your callback endpoint. More info.	N/A
parse	true will return structured data as long as you define parsing_instructions	false
parsing_instructions	Define your own parsing and data transformation logic that will be executed on an HTML scraping result. Read more: Parsing instructions examples.	N/A

- required parameter

If you are observing low success rates or retrieve empty content, please try using additional "render": "html" parameter in your request. More info about render parameter can be found here.

Code examples

Simple request

In this example, we make a simple request to the Web Scraper API by including only the URL to be scraped. In a lot of cases this will be enough to yield a good result.

JSON

{
    "source": "universal", 
    "url": "https://sandbox.oxylabs.io/"
}

cURL

curl --user "user:pass1" \
'https://realtime.oxylabs.io/v1/queries' \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"source": "universal", "url": "https://sandbox.oxylabs.io/"}'

Python

from pprint import pprint
import requests

# Structure payload.
payload = {
    'source': 'universal',
    'url': 'https://sandbox.oxylabs.io/'
}

# Get response.
response = requests.request(
    'POST',
    'https://realtime.oxylabs.io/v1/queries',
    auth=('user', 'pass1'),
    json=payload,
)

# Instead of response with job status and results url, this will return the
# JSON response with the result.
pprint(response.json())

PHP

<?php

$params = [
    'source' => 'universal',
    'url' => 'https://sandbox.oxylabs.io/
];

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://data.oxylabs.io/v1/queries");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($params));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "user:pass1");

$headers = [];
$headers[] = "Content-Type: application/json";
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);

$result = curl_exec($ch);
echo $result;

if (curl_errno($ch)) {
    echo 'Error:' . curl_error($ch);
}
curl_close($ch);

HTTP

# The whole string you submit has to be URL-encoded.

https://realtime.oxylabs.io/v1/queries?source=universal&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsandbox.oxylabs.io%2F

The example above uses the Realtime integration method. If you would like to use some other integration method in your query (e.g. Push-Pull or Proxy Endpoint), refer to the integration methods section.

You can always write your own parsing instructions with Custom Parser feature and get structured data.

All parameters

In this example, all available parameters are included (though not always necessary or compatible within the same request), to give you an idea on how to format your requests.

{
    "source": "universal", 
    "url": "https://example.com", 
    "user_agent_type": "desktop",
    "geo_location": "United States",
    "context": [
        {
            "key": "headers", 
            "value": {
                "Content-Type": "application/octet-stream", 
                "Custom-Header-Name": "custom header content"
                }
        }, 
        {
            "key": "cookies", 
            "value": [
                {
                    "key": "NID", 
                    "value": "1234567890"
                },
                {
                    "key": "1P JAR",
                    "value": "0987654321"
                }]
        },
        {
            "key": "follow_redirects",
            "value": true
        },
        {
            "key": "http_method", "value": "get"
        },
        {
            "key": "content",
            "value": "base64EncodedPOSTBody"
        },
        {
            "key": "successful_status_codes",
            "value": [303, 808, 909]
        }]
}

Parameter values

Geo_Location

Check the complete list of supported geo_location values here.

Here is an example:

"United Arab Emirates",
"Albania",
"Armenia",
"Angola",
"Argentina",
"Australia",
...
"Uruguay",
"Uzbekistan",
"Venezuela Bolivarian Republic of",
"Vietnam",
"South Africa",
"Zimbabwe"

HTTP_Method

Universal Crawler supports two HTTP(S) methods: GET (default) and POST.

"GET",
"POST"

Locale

Using thelocale parameter will allow you to change your target page's web interface language (not results).

For example, if you use domain com and locale parameter de-DE, the results will still be American, but Accept-Language header value will be set to de-DE,de;q=0.8. This would imitate a person from US searching in com domain, who has the UI of his browser set to German language.

If you don't use this parameter, we will set 'Accept-Language' parameter to match the domain (i.e. en-US for com).

Download the full list of locale values in JSON here.

[  
   {  
      "locale":{  
         "en-ai":{  
            "description":"Anguilla - English",
            "domain":"com.ai"
         },
         "es-pr":{  
            "description":"Puerto Rico - Spanish",
            "domain":"com.pr"
         },
         ...
         "en-by":{  
            "description":"Belarus - English",
            "domain":"by"
         },
         "en-in":{  
            "description":"India - English",
            "domain":"co.in"
         }
      }
   }
]