A Practical Introduction to Web Scraping in Python :
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Python web scraping allows you to collect and parse data from websites programmatically. With powerful libraries like urllib, Beautiful Soup, and MechanicalSoup, you can fetch and manipulate HTML content effortlessly. By automating data collection tasks, Python makes web scraping both efficient and effective.
You can build a Python web scraping workflow using only the standard library by fetching a web page with urllib and extracting data using string methods or regular expressions. For more complex HTML or more robust workflows, you can use the third-party library Beautiful Soup, which simplifies HTML parsing. By adding MechanicalSoup to your toolkit, you can even enable interactions with HTML forms.
By the end of this tutorial, you’ll understand that:
- Python is well-suited for web scraping due to its extensive libraries, such as Beautiful Soup and MechanicalSoup.
- You can scrape websites with Python by fetching HTML content using
urlliband extracting data using string methods or parsers like Beautiful Soup. - Beautiful Soup is a great choice for parsing HTML documents with Python effectively.
- Data scraping may be illegal if it violates a website’s terms of use, so always review the website’s acceptable use policy.
This tutorial guides you through extracting data from websites using string methods, regular expressions, and HTML parsers.
Note: This tutorial is adapted from the chapter “Interacting With the Web” in Python Basics: A Practical Introduction to Python 3.
The book uses Python’s built-in IDLE editor to create and edit Python files and interact with the Python shell, so you’ll see occasional references to IDLE throughout this tutorial. However, you should have no problems running the example code from the editor and environment of your choice.
Source Code: Click here to download the free source code that you’ll use to collect and parse data from the Web.
Take the Quiz: Test your knowledge with our interactive “A Practical Introduction to Web Scraping in Python” quiz. You’ll receive a score upon completion to help you track your learning progress:
Interactive Quiz
A Practical Introduction to Web Scraping in PythonIn this quiz, you'll test your understanding of web scraping in Python. Web scraping is a powerful tool for data collection and analysis. By working through this quiz, you'll revisit how to parse website data using string methods, regular expressions, and HTML parsers, as well as how to interact with forms and other website components.
Scrape and Parse Text From Websites
Collecting data from websites using an automated process is known as web scraping. Some websites explicitly forbid users from scraping their data with automated tools like the ones that you’ll create in this tutorial. Websites do this for two possible reasons:
- The site has a good reason to protect its data. For instance, Google Maps doesn’t let you request too many results too quickly.
- Making many repeated requests to a website’s server may use up bandwidth, slowing down the website for other users and potentially overloading the server such that the website stops responding entirely.
Before using your Python skills for web scraping, you should always check your target website’s acceptable use policy to see if accessing the website with automated tools is a violation of its terms of use. Legally, web scraping against the wishes of a website is very much a gray area.
Important: Please be aware that the following techniques may be illegal when used on websites that prohibit web scraping.
For this tutorial, you’ll use a page that’s hosted on Real Python’s server. The page that you’ll access has been set up for use with this tutorial.
Now that you’ve read the disclaimer, you can get to the fun stuff. In the next section, you’ll start grabbing all the HTML code from a single web page.
Build Your First Web Scraper
One useful package for web scraping that you can find in Python’s standard library is urllib, which contains tools for working with URLs. In particular, the urllib.request module contains a function called urlopen() that you can use to open a URL within a program.
In IDLE’s interactive window, type the following to import urlopen():
>>> from urllib.request import urlopen
The web page that you’ll open is at the following URL:
>>> url = "http://olympus.realpython.org/profiles/aphrodite"
To open the web page, pass url to urlopen():
>>> page = urlopen(url)
urlopen() returns an HTTPResponse object:
>>> page
<http.client.HTTPResponse object at 0x105fef820>
Read the full article at https://realpython.com/python-web-scraping-practical-introduction/ »
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December 21, 2024 at 07:30PM
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