Meta-Language

The main purpose of the Diggernaut service is the transformation of disparate web content into ordered arrays of data. In the future such arrays are easy to process, analyze and cast into any form. We use robots, which are called diggers, for scraping and acquiring information from various resources. However, in order for them to do their job, they need to be properly programmed. To do this, you must create an algorithm for the logic (configuration / script) of the digger, and you can do this in several ways.

Meta-language is one of the available tools for completing this task. It is very powerful and flexible, to cope with the most difficult tasks, and at the same time very simple to learn and use, because it contains only such directives that are actually used for scraping and parsing. It is not requires the installation of any interpreter or IDE on your computer, you can write your code in a convenient editor on the Diggernaut website, while we do not limit you to the choice of the editor, you can write code anywhere, for example, in Visual Studio Code, Brackets or Sublime Text.

We wrote this manual for those who want to learn our meta-language and use the full power of the Diggernaut service for solving really complex tasks and scraping technically complex sites. You do not have to be an expert in programming and you can not even know any programming language. All this is not necessary for mastering the meta-language. However, we expect that you have the basic knowledge of HTML and CSS to build CSS / JQuery path to the container on page which has data you need to extract. Also, you need to know how the YAML markup language works, because the configurations of diggers are written in this format.

If you decide to continue reading this document and learn how to program in our meta-language, we can assure you that you can solve the problem of any complexity with Diggernaut and scrape practically any source website.