Web scraping with Python using BeautifulSoup4
In this article, we will discuss:
- How does Web Scraping Work?
- What is Beautiful Soup
- Installing Requests and Beautiful Soup
- Easy steps for scraping in Python using Requests and Beautiful Soup
- How does Web Scraping Work?
Scraping a web page means requesting specific data from a target webpage. When you scrape a page, the code you write sends your request to the server hosting the destination page. The code then downloads the page, only extracting the elements of the page defined initially in the crawling job.
For example, let’s say we are looking to target data in H3 title tags. We would write code for a scraper that looks specifically for that information. The scraper will work in three stages:
Step 1: Send a request to the server to download the site’s content.
Step 2: Filter the page’s HTML to look for the desired H3 tags.
Step 3: Copying the text inside the target tags, producing the output in the format previously specified in the code.
It is possible to carry out web scraping tasks in many programming languages with different libraries, but using Python with the Beautiful Soup library is one of the most popular and effective methods. In the following sections, we will cover the basics for scraping in Python using Beautiful Soup.
What is Beautiful Soup?
Beautiful Soup provides simple methods for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree in HTML, XML files. It transforms a complex HTML document into a tree of Python objects. It also automatically converts the document to Unicode, so you don’t have to think about encodings. This tool not only helps you scrape but also to clean the data. Beautiful Soup supports the HTML parser included in Python’s standard library, but it also supports several third-party Python parsers like lxml or hml5lib.
You can learn more about the full spectrum of its capabilities here: Beautiful Soup documentation.
Installing Requests and Beautiful Soup
To install beautiful soup, you need pip or any other Python installer. You can also use your jupyter lab. In this post, we will use pip as it is the most convenient. Open your terminal or Jupyter Lab and write:
pip install beautifulsoup4
