Mar 18, 2021 Web scraping with Python is easy due to the many useful libraries available. A barebones installation isn’t enough for web scraping. One of the Python advantages is a large selection of libraries for web scraping. For this Python web scraping tutorial, we’ll be using three important libraries – BeautifulSoup v4, Pandas, and Selenium. Jul 09, 2019 So, the last step before performing web scraping methods is to understand a bit of the HTML language. HTML is, from a really basic point of view, composed of elements that have attributes. An element could be a paragraph, and an attribute could be that the paragraph is in bold letter. It is a simple python web scraping library. It is an efficient HTTP library used for accessing web pages. With the help of Requests, we can get the raw HTML of web pages which can then be parsed for retrieving the data. Before using requests, let us understand its installation.
Python makes it simple to grab data from the web. This is a guide (or maybe cheat sheet) on how you can scrape the web easily with Requests and Beautiful Soup 4.
Getting started
First, you need to install the right tools.
These are the ones we will use for the scraping. Create a new python file and import them at the top of your file.
Fetch with Requests
The Requests library will be used to fetch the pages. To make a GET request, you simply use the GET method.
You can get a lot of information from the request.
To be able to scrape your page, you need to use the Beautiful Soup library. You need to save the response content to turn it into a soup object.
You can see the HTML in a readable format with the prettify method.
Scrape with Beautiful Soup
Now to the actual scraping. Getting the data from the HTML code.
Using CSS Selector
The easiest way is probably to use the CSS selector, which can be copied within Chrome.
Here, I have selected the first Google result. Inspected the HTML. Right clicked the element, selected copy and choose the Copy selector alternative.
The select element will, however, return an array. If you only want one object, you can use the select_one method instead.
Using Tags
You can also scrape by tags (a, h1, p, div) with the following syntax.
It is also possible to use the id or class attribute to scrape the HTML.
Using find_all
Another method you can use is find_all. It will basically return all elements that match.
You can also use the find method, which will return a single element instead of an array.
Get the values
Basic Web Scraping Python Tutorial
The most important part of scarping is getting the actual values (or text) from the element.
Get the inner text (the actual text printed on the page) with this method.
Python Web Scraping Sample
If you want to get a specific attribute of an element, like the href, use this syntax: