About Lesson
Introduction to Web Scraping
- Definition: Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites. It involves fetching the web page content and parsing it to retrieve the desired information.
- Applications: Used for data collection, market research, price monitoring, and more.
- Ethical Considerations: Always check the website’s
robots.txtfile and terms of service to ensure that web scraping is allowed. Respect the website’s policies and avoid overloading the server with requests.
Using BeautifulSoup and requests
requests Library
- Definition: The
requestslibrary is used to send HTTP requests to a website and retrieve the content of the web page. - Installation: Install the library using
pip. bashpip install requests - Example: python
import requests url = "https://example.com" response = requests.get(url) print(response.text) # Output: HTML content of the web page
BeautifulSoup Library
- Definition: The
BeautifulSouplibrary is used to parse HTML and XML documents and extract data from them. - Installation: Install the library using
pip. bashpip install beautifulsoup4 - Example: python
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup html_content = "<html><body><h1>Hello, World!</h1></body></html>" soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, "html.parser") print(soup.h1.text) # Output: Hello, World!