Use this tool to retrieve the content of a web page or download an image from a given URL. It handles CAPTCHAs, IP blocks, and rate limits automatically via ScraperAPI's proxy infrastructure.
When to use:
- Extracting text content from web pages (articles, product listings, search results, etc.)
- Downloading images from URLs (returns the image directly if the URL points to an image file)
- Scraping geo-restricted content by specifying a country code
- Retrieving structured data (CSV/JSON) from supported websites with autoparse enabled
When NOT to use:
- For URLs that require authentication or login (ScraperAPI cannot access authenticated sessions)
- For non-HTTP resources (e.g., FTP, local files)
- When you already have the content and don't need to fetch it again (this tool is rate-limited)
Args:
params (Scrape): Validated input parameters containing:
- url (AnyUrl): The full URL to scrape (e.g. 'https://example.com/page')
- render (bool): Enable JavaScript rendering for dynamic pages (default: false)
- country_code (Optional[str]): ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code for geo-targeted scraping (e.g. 'us', 'gb')
- premium (bool): Use premium proxies for difficult sites (default: false)
- ultra_premium (bool): Use ultra-premium proxies for heavily protected sites (default: false)
- device_type (Optional[DeviceType]): 'mobile' or 'desktop' User-Agent emulation
- output_format (OutputFormat): Response format — 'markdown' (default), 'text', 'csv', or 'json'
- autoparse (bool): Enable structured data extraction for supported sites (default: false)
Returns:
For web pages: str containing the page content in the requested output_format.
- 'markdown': Clean, readable markdown extracted from the page HTML
- 'text': Plain text without any formatting
- 'csv': Comma-separated values (requires autoparse=true on supported sites)
- 'json': JSON string (requires autoparse=true on supported sites)
For image URLs: Image object with binary image data (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP, TIFF, or SVG).
Images larger than ~700KB are rejected.
Raises:
ToolError: If the API key is not configured, rate limit is exceeded, or the scrape operation fails.
