The Star (Malaysia) Article Scraper

Extract article metadata, author, and available text from any thestar.com.my article URL. The Star is Malaysia's largest English-language newspaper covering national news, business, and lifestyle.

Why Use This Actor?

• Malaysian news monitoring - track the most-read English-language paper in Malaysia.
• Regional Southeast Asian coverage - unique perspective on Malaysia, ASEAN, and regional politics.
• Metadata and headline extraction - useful even under the Piano paywall: author, date, title, and intro always available.

How It Works

This actor uses only HTTP requests - no browser, no Selenium, no Playwright. Articles are extracted in seconds with RAM usage well under 256 MB.

Note: The Star uses a Piano paywall. Only the intro paragraphs (typically 1–3) are freely visible. Author, title, and publication date are always extracted from structured metadata.

Input

{
  "url": "https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2026/03/06/interactive-malaysias-score-improves-for-gender-equality-but-we-are-still-worst-in-asean",
  "urls": [
    "https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2026/04/23/article-one",
    "https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2026/04/22/article-two"
  ],
  "mode": "article",
  "limit": 10
}

Output

{
  "url": "https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2026/05/15/singer-namewee-freed-of-drug-related-charges",
  "source": "The Star",
  "title": "Singer Namewee freed of drug-related charges",
  "description": "",
  "content": "KUALA LUMPUR: Singer Wee Meng Chee, better known as Namewee, has been acquitted by the Magistrate’s Court of two drug-related charges. Magistrate Khairunnisak Hassni granted a discharge and acquittal after the prosecution informed the court that the Attorney General’s Chambers had accepted Namewee’s second representation to drop the charges. His first representation, submitted last month, was rejected....",
  "image": "https://apicms.thestar.com.my/uploads/images/2026/05/15/3908737.jpg",
  "language": "en_GB",
  "word_count": 116,
  "published_date": "2026-05-14T16:00:00.000Z",
  "modified_date": "2026-05-15T01:31:16.000Z",
  "authors": [
    "The Star Online"
  ],
  "categories": "",
  "tags": ""
}

Fetch Latest News

Set mode to "latest" to fetch the newest article URLs and titles from The Star news section instead of extracting a single article.

Input:

{
  "mode": "latest",
  "limit": 10
}

Output - array of objects:

[
  {
    "url": "https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2026/04/23/37-foreigners-held-in-raid-on-johor-entertainment-outlet",
    "title": "37 foreigners held in raid on Johor entertainment outlet",
    "source": "The Star"
  }
]

Source: https://www.thestar.com.my/news (homepage, no public RSS available)

Cron Schedule: Auto-Fetch Newest Articles

Combine mode: "latest" and mode: "article" to keep a fresh feed running on autopilot:

1. Schedule a recurring run of this Actor with {"mode": "latest", "limit": 20} via Apify Schedules (UI ▸ Schedules ▸ Create new). A cron expression like */30 * * * * runs it every 30 minutes.
2. Webhook the dataset of the latest run into another Actor run with mode: "article" and the new URLs as input — Apify integrations let you chain runs via the "Actor finished" webhook without any glue code.
3. The article-mode run extracts the full body, image, authors, and metadata for each URL and appends to your master dataset.

Common cron expressions:

Frequency	Cron
Every 15 minutes	*/15 * * * *
Hourly	0 * * * *
Every 6 hours	0 */6 * * *
Daily at 06:00 UTC	0 6 * * *

Other News Actors

Need a different news source? All actors in this collection:

Actor	Source
aljazeera-scraper	Al Jazeera
apnews-scraper	AP News
bbc-scraper	BBC News
bisnis-scraper	Bisnis Indonesia
cnbc-scraper	CNBC
dataindonesia-scraper	Data Indonesia
forbes-scraper	Forbes
fortune-scraper	Fortune
ft-scraper	Financial Times
guardian-scraper	The Guardian
investors-scraper	Investor's Business Daily
msn-scraper	MSN News
nytimes-scraper	New York Times
reuters-scraper	Reuters
scmp-scraper	South China Morning Post
smh-scraper	Sydney Morning Herald
straitstimes-scraper	The Straits Times
techcrunch-scraper	TechCrunch
thestar-scraper	The Star (Malaysia)
upi-scraper	UPI
yahoo-finance-scraper	Yahoo Finance

Scope & Compliance

• Public content only. This actor requests pages the same way an ordinary anonymous visitor's browser does. It uses no login, no subscriber credentials, no cookies from a paid account, and does not attempt to obtain content the publisher withholds from anonymous visitors.
• Subscriber-only material is not retrieved. Where the publisher serves only a headline, summary or intro to anonymous visitors, that is what the actor returns — and it flags the result so your pipeline can tell the difference.
• No security control is defeated. The actor sends ordinary HTTPS requests with a browser-accurate TLS fingerprint so it does not need a browser engine. It solves no CAPTCHAs and forges no authentication.
• Copyright stays with the publisher. Output is intended for research, monitoring, archiving and analysis. You are responsible for using it in line with the publisher's Terms of Service, copyright law and any applicable data-protection rules — republishing article text is generally not permitted.
• Rate limits are respected. Requests are paced and retried politely; the actor is not designed for denial-of-service-scale traffic.