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How to clean web-extracted data?

TL;DR

Web-extracted data requires cleaning: remove HTML artifacts, normalize formats (dates, currencies), handle missing values, and validate records. Manual cleaning is tedious; Firecrawl Agent handles most cleaning automatically—returning typed, normalized data rather than raw text.

How to clean web-extracted data?

Raw scraped data is messy. Prices include symbols and commas. Dates appear in various formats. Text contains   entities and extra whitespace.

IssueSolution
HTML artifacts (&)Decode entities
Extra whitespaceTrim and normalize
Price formats ($1,234)Parse to number
Date variationsConvert to ISO
Missing values (N/A, "")Standardize to null

Schema-based extraction reduces cleaning work—Firecrawl returns typed data automatically:

result = app.scrape_url(url, {
    "formats": ["extract"],
    "extract": {
        "schema": {
            "properties": {
                "price": {"type": "number"}  # Returns numeric, not "$29.99"
            }
        }
    }
})

Key Takeaways

Data cleaning normalizes formats and removes artifacts. Schema-based extraction APIs like Firecrawl handle this automatically—prices as numbers, booleans as booleans, text without HTML artifacts.

Last updated: Feb 09, 2026
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