URL filters

It is common for a web site to contain many thousands of pages. When performing a search, it is likely that the relevant content is restricted to a few pages only. To avoid wasting time scanning irrelevant pages, you can tell Email Grabber what the URL must (or must not) contain in order to be accepted for scanning using URL filters.

By trying to find patterns in the relevant (or irrelevant) URLs you should be able to guide Email Grabber to the relevant content.

Email Grabber URL filters screenshot

Filter mode

The first option you need to select is how the filters are going to work, using the filter mode.

If you choose to Only collect URLs that match any of the following expressions, Email Grabber will only follow URLs that match any of the filters added.

Alternatively, you can choose the option to Do not collect URLs that match any of the following expressions, which will make Email Grabber reject URLs that match the URL filters added to the list.

Add filter

You can add multiple URL filters. Each filter is defined by the expression to match, the level to which it applies and the filter matching mode.

Filters can be set to apply to any level or just a specific one. This can be very helpful when performing a search that needs to go through multiple levels.
When deciding whether or not to add an extracted URL to the queue, Email Grabber will test the URL against the filters that have been created for that specific level or the filters created for All levels

When adding each filter you can choose between 3 filter matching modes: Normal, Wildcards and Regular Expressions.

You can test the URL filters at any time, even before starting a search, using the Debug Search tool

You can change filters at anytime during your search. When you make any changes, Email Grabber will give you the choice of leaving the current list of URLs in queue unchanged or to apply the filters to the URLs waiting to be scanned, removing any that doesn't respect the new filters.

If you reuse filters between searches, you can save filters to a file using the Save icon. Using the Open icon you can load previously saved filters from a file.