Beautiful Soup: Build a Web Scraper With Python

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October 28, 2024
Beautiful Soup: Build a Web Scraper With Python
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Web scraping is the automated process of extracting data from the internet. The Python libraries Requests and Beautiful Soup are powerful tools for the job. To effectively harvest the vast amount of data available online for your research, projects, or personal interests, you’ll need to become skilled at web scraping.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:

  • Inspect the HTML structure of your target site with your browser’s developer tools
  • Decipher data encoded in URLs
  • Use Requests and Beautiful Soup for scraping and parsing data from the internet
  • Step through a web scraping pipeline from start to finish
  • Build a script that fetches job offers from websites and displays relevant information in your console

If you like learning with hands-on examples and have a basic understanding of Python and HTML, then this tutorial is for you! Working through this project will give you the knowledge and tools you need to scrape any static website out there on the World Wide Web. You can download the project source code by clicking on the link below:

Take the Quiz: Test your knowledge with our interactive “Beautiful Soup: Build a Web Scraper With Python” quiz. You’ll receive a score upon completion to help you track your learning progress:

Beautiful Soup: Build a Web Scraper With Python

Interactive Quiz

Beautiful Soup: Build a Web Scraper With Python

In this quiz, you'll test your understanding of web scraping using Python. By working through this quiz, you'll revisit how to inspect the HTML structure of a target site, decipher data encoded in URLs, and use Requests and Beautiful Soup for scraping and parsing data from the Web.

What Is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of gathering information from the internet. Even copying and pasting the lyrics of your favorite song can be considered a form of web scraping! However, the term “web scraping” usually refers to a process that involves automation. While some websites don’t like it when automatic scrapers gather their data, which can lead to legal issues, others don’t mind it.

If you’re scraping a page respectfully for educational purposes, then you’re unlikely to have any problems. Still, it’s a good idea to do some research on your own to make sure you’re not violating any Terms of Service before you start a large-scale web scraping project.

Reasons for Automated Web Scraping

Say that you like to surf—both in the ocean and online—and you’re looking for employment. It’s clear that you’re not interested in just any job. With a surfer’s mindset, you’re waiting for the perfect opportunity to roll your way!

You know about a job site that offers precisely the kinds of jobs you want. Unfortunately, a new position only pops up once in a blue moon, and the site doesn’t provide an email notification service. You consider checking up on it every day, but that doesn’t sound like the most fun and productive way to spend your time. You’d rather be outside surfing real-life waves!

Thankfully, Python offers a way to apply your surfer’s mindset. Instead of having to check the job site every day, you can use Python to help automate the repetitive parts of your job search. With automated web scraping, you can write the code once, and it’ll get the information that you need many times and from many pages.

There’s so much information on the internet, with new information constantly being added. You’ll probably be interested in some of that data, and much of it is out there for the taking. Whether you’re actually on the job hunt or just want to automatically download all the lyrics of your favorite artist, automated web scraping can help you accomplish your goals.

Challenges of Web Scraping

The internet has grown organically out of many sources. It combines many different technologies, styles, and personalities, and it continues to grow every day. In other words, the internet is a hot mess! Because of this, you’ll run into some challenges when scraping the web:

  • Variety: Every website is different. While you’ll encounter general structures that repeat themselves, each website is unique and will need personal treatment if you want to extract the relevant information.

  • Durability: Websites constantly change. Say you’ve built a shiny new web scraper that automatically cherry-picks what you want from your resource of interest. The first time you run your script, it works flawlessly. But when you run the same script a while later, you run into a discouraging and lengthy stack of tracebacks!

Unstable scripts are a realistic scenario because many websites are in active development. If a site’s structure changes, then your scraper might not be able to navigate the sitemap correctly or find the relevant information. The good news is that changes to websites are often small and incremental, so you’ll likely be able to update your scraper with minimal adjustments.

Still, keep in mind that the internet is dynamic and keeps on changing. Therefore, the scrapers you build will probably require maintenance. You can set up continuous integration to run scraping tests periodically to ensure that your main script doesn’t break without your knowledge.

An Alternative to Web Scraping: APIs

Some website providers offer application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow you to access their data in a predefined manner. With APIs, you can avoid parsing HTML. Instead, you can access the data directly using formats like JSON and XML. HTML is primarily a way to visually present content to users.

When you use an API, the data collection process is generally more stable than it is through web scraping. That’s because developers create APIs to be consumed by programs rather than by human eyes.

The front-end presentation of a site might change often, but a change in the website’s design doesn’t affect its API structure. The structure of an API is usually more permanent, which means it’s a more reliable source of the site’s data.

However, APIs can change as well. The challenges of both variety and durability apply to APIs just as they do to websites. Additionally, it’s much harder to inspect the structure of an API by yourself if the provided documentation lacks quality.

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/beautiful-soup-web-scraper-python/ »

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October 28, 2024 at 07:30PM
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