1. What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites automatically. It allows developers to collect, process, and analyze data from web pages using code.
1.1 How Does Web Scraping Work?
- Send a Request – Access the webpage using HTTP requests.
- Parse the HTML – Extract specific data using libraries like BeautifulSoup or lxml.
- Extract Data – Identify and retrieve useful information from the HTML.
- Store the Data – Save the extracted data in a structured format (CSV, JSON, database).
2. Tools & Libraries for Web Scraping
Several Python libraries help with web scraping:
| Library | Description |
|---|---|
requests | Fetches web pages |
BeautifulSoup | Parses HTML & XML |
lxml | Fast XML/HTML parser |
Selenium | Automates browser interaction |
Scrapy | Advanced web scraping framework |
3. Web Scraping with BeautifulSoup
3.1 Install Dependencies
pip install requests beautifulsoup4
3.2 Fetch a Webpage
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "https://example.com"
response = requests.get(url)
# Parse HTML
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")
# Print page title
print(soup.title.text)
3.3 Extract Specific Data
# Extract all links
for link in soup.find_all("a"):
print(link.get("href"))
4. Web Scraping with Selenium
Selenium is used for scraping dynamic websites that use JavaScript.
4.1 Install Selenium
pip install selenium
4.2 Setup WebDriver
Download ChromeDriver from ChromeDriver Site.
4.3 Automate Web Browsing
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://example.com")
print(driver.title) # Print page title
driver.quit()
5. Scrapy: Advanced Web Scraping
Scrapy is a powerful framework for large-scale web scraping.
5.1 Install Scrapy
pip install scrapy
5.2 Create a Scrapy Project
scrapy startproject my_scraper
5.3 Run Scrapy Spider
scrapy crawl my_spider
6. Best Practices for Web Scraping
✔ Respect robots.txt – Check website rules before scraping.
✔ Use Headers – Mimic real browsers to avoid blocks.
✔ Use Proxies – Avoid IP bans for large-scale scraping.
✔ Throttle Requests – Avoid overloading websites.