I Replaced 5 State Website Scrapers with One API Call
I Replaced 5 State Website Scrapers with One API Call If you've ever had to verify a contractor or nurse license, you know the pain. Each state has its own website, its own search form, its own out...

Source: DEV Community
I Replaced 5 State Website Scrapers with One API Call If you've ever had to verify a contractor or nurse license, you know the pain. Each state has its own website, its own search form, its own output format. California's CSLB looks nothing like Texas's TDLR, which looks nothing like Florida's DBPR. I was building a compliance tool for a staffing platform and kept writing throwaway scrapers for each state. After the third one broke because a state board redesigned their site, I just built an API that normalizes all of them. Here's the before/after. The Manual Way (Per State) For California contractors, you'd go to the CSLB site, fill out a form, parse the HTML response. For Texas, it's TDLR with a completely different flow. Florida? DBPR, another UI. Each state takes 5-10 minutes to look up manually. If you're verifying 50 contractors for a construction company, that's 4+ hours of tab-switching. And if you're doing it programmatically? You need a separate scraper for each state, each w