A Brief Introduction to Web Scraping with Python

With the digital economy's expansion, web scraping's role is becoming?more important day by day. Read this blog to learn what web scraping is, how it works, and why it's essential for data analytics.??

The amount of data in our day-to-day life is growing exponentially. With this rise, data analytics has become essential to how organizations are running. While data has numerous sources, and of course, its most extensive repository is on the web. As the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics grow, the companies require data analysts who can scrape the web in the best possible ways.??

Just imagine if you had to pull a large amount of data from websites quickly;?how would you do it? Well, "Web Scraping" is the ideal answer. Web Scraping makes this job quite fast.???

Basically, Web scraping is used to collect huge amounts of information from websites. But why is there a need to collect such large data from websites? Let's look into the bullet points mentioned below to learn about this.? ?

• Price Comparison?
• Social Media Scraping??
• Email address gathering??
• Job listings?
• Research and Development??

As the data on the websites are unstructured, web scraping helps collect these unstructured data and then store it in a structured form.??

Did you know- Why Python is a Good Choice for Web Scraping???

Here we have listed some features of Python that make it suitable for web scraping.??

Easy to Use:???

Python is considered a simple code language. In this language, the coder doesn't have to add semi-colons ";" or curly-braces "{}" anywhere, which makes it easy to use.??

Large Collection of Libraries:???

Python has a great collection of libraries that provides methods & services for several purposes. Hence, it is a perfect choice for web scraping & further manipulation of extracted data.??

Dynamically Typed:???

In this high-end language, you don't have to define data types for variables; in fact, you can directly use the variables wherever needed. Of course, it saves much time.??

Easy Syntax:???

The syntax of Python is easily understandable because reading Python code is similar to reading a statement in English. It is highly expressive and readable.??

Small Code, Perform a Large Task:???

Web scraping is basically used to save time. But what's the point if you spend more time writing the code? Well, in Python, you can write small codes to do large tasks.???

When you run the code for the web scraping, a request is sent to the URL. As a response to that request, the server sends the data & allows you to read the HTML or XML page. After that, the code parses the HTML or XML page, thus finding the data & extracts it.???

If you want to extract data using web scraping with Python, these are the basic steps:???

• First of all, find the URL that you want to scrape??
• Inspecting the Page??
• Find the data which you want to extract??
• Write the code??
• Run the code & extract the data??
• Store the data in the proper format???

Hopefully, you like the blog "Web Scraping with Python." Probably, this piece of information will be useful for you. Now, you can go ahead and try Web Scraping.???