Web Scraping Basics

Web scraping is a powerful technique employed to extract data from websites. It involves fetching web pages and systematically extracting relevant information from their HTML structure. This method allows you to automate the process of gathering large amounts of data from the web, which would otherwise be time-consuming and impractical to collect manually. In this hands-on exercise, you will learn the fundamentals of web scraping using Python's BeautifulSoup library by performing basic operations such as:

• Fetching HTML content from a web page

• Parsing HTML content

• Extracting specific elements and data

• Extracting links

Requests Library

Before we dive into BeautifulSoup, it's important to understand the Requests library, which is used to fetch HTML content from web pages. Requests is a simple and elegant HTTP library for Python, designed to make sending HTTP requests straightforward and user-friendly. It abstracts the complexities of making HTTP requests, handling cookies, sessions, and redirects, allowing you to focus on interacting with the web content.

Installation

pip install requests

BeautifulSoup

BeautifulSoup is a powerful Python library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It creates a parse tree for parsed pages that can be used to extract data from HTML, which is useful for web scraping. BeautifulSoup provides Pythonic idioms for iterating, searching, and modifying the parse tree, making it easier to navigate and extract data from complex web pages.

Installation

pip install beautifulsoup4

Applications of Web Scraping

• Data Analysis: Extracting data from websites for analysis in fields like finance, marketing, and social media.

• Market Research: Gathering data on products, prices, and reviews to understand market trends and consumer behaviour.

• Price Comparison: Collecting price information from various e-commerce sites to compare and find the best deals.

• Content Aggregation: Aggregating news, blogs, or other content from multiple websites into a single platform.

Learn more at: Beautiful Soup (HTML parser)

What You Will Learn

• Web scraping and its applications

• Setting up a BeautifulSoup environment

• Fetching and parsing HTML content from python

• Extracting data using BeautifulSoup

• Navigating HTML tree structures

• Handling exceptions and common challenges in web scraping