📚 TV Tropes Scraper — Tropes, Examples & Change Monitor

Turn TV Tropes into structured data — it has no public API, but this actor reads its pages directly: trope and work pages with title, description, the full list of examples, and every cross-linked trope/work. Scrape by URL, or crawl a whole namespace. Run it on a schedule to monitor pages for edits and get Slack / email / webhook alerts.

No login, no JavaScript rendering — TV Tropes pages are server-rendered HTML.

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What does it do?

For each trope or work page it returns clean, structured data you can export to JSON, CSV, Excel, or push to your app via API:

• 🏷️ Title, namespace, page type (trope / Film / Series / VideoGame / …)
• 📝 Description (the page's intro paragraphs)
• 📋 Examples — the list entries (+ folder section labels)
• 🔗 Cross-links — every linked trope/work with its {namespace, name, url}
• 🧬 Content hash for change detection

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What data does it extract?

For every page: url, namespace, name, title, page_type, description, links[] ({text, namespace, name, url}), link_count, examples[], example_count, folders[], content_hash, change (monitor: new / updated / unchanged), scraped_at.

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Who is it for?

• 🤖 AI / ML / dataset builders — trope graphs and example corpora are popular for NLP and story-modeling.
• ✍️ Writers & researchers mapping tropes across works.
• 📊 Wiki analysts tracking how pages and examples evolve over time (the wiki edits daily).

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How to use it (step by step)

1. Click Try for free.
2. Paste page URLs (or Namespace/Name) — or set a namespace to crawl (e.g. Main, Film).
3. (Optional) toggle examples / cross-links.
4. Click Start, open the Dataset tab to view/export.
5. (Optional) set monitorMode + a Schedule to get alerts when pages change.

Quick start

{ "pageUrls": ["Main/ChekhovsGun", "Series/BreakingBad"] }

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Input

Field	What it does
pageUrls	TV Tropes page URLs / Namespace/Name
namespace, namespaceStartLetter	crawl a whole namespace via the index
includeExamples, includeLinks	toggle example list / cross-links
maxPages	hard cap per run (0 = all)
monitorMode, alertOnChange	recurring change watcher + alerts
webhookUrl, slackWebhookUrl, emailRecipients	alert channels
proxyConfiguration, requestConcurrency	proxy + parallelism

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Output

Each page is one dataset record (fields above). Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or RSS, or fetch via the Apify API.

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How much does it cost?

Pay-per-event — you pay for what you pull:

Event	What it covers	Suggested price
lot-scraped	each page returned	~$0.003 / page
monitor-run-completed	each scheduled watch run	~$0.05 / run
new-lot-detected	each new/changed page	~$0.02 / page
alert-delivered	each Slack/email/webhook push	~$0.005 / alert

(Final per-event prices are set on the actor's pricing page.)

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Is it legal to scrape TV Tropes?

TV Tropes content is publicly viewable and contributed under the site's terms (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA). This actor reads public pages — no personal data. Scraping public pages is generally legal, but you are responsible for your use — review TV Tropes' Terms of Service, attribute, and respect the non-commercial share-alike license when redistributing.

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FAQ

TV Tropes has no API — how does this work? It reads the server-rendered HTML pages directly and parses them, so you get structured data without an API.

Can I crawl a whole category? Yes — set namespace (e.g. Main for all tropes) and a maxPages cap; the actor enumerates the index.

Can I detect when a page changes? Yes — monitorMode hashes each page and emits only new/changed pages, with alerts.

How do I export? JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or RSS from the Dataset tab, or via the Apify API.

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Feedback

Want laconic/quote extraction, image lists, or per-folder example grouping? Open an issue on the actor.