Web Scraping in python: How to scrape data from a website in Python
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Web scraping is the process of extracting data from a specific web page. alternatively we can say that web scraping is a word that refers to the practice of extracting and processing vast amounts of data from the internet using a computer or algorithm. This is very useful technique and skill and it is required in every steps in data world whether you’re a data scientist or data engineer. It plays an significant role while harvesting large amount of data from any website.
Why is python used for web scraping
- Python web scraping is an automated method used for collecting large amounts of data from websites and storing it in a structured form.
- Python has many inbuilt libraries like Pandas, Matplotlib, Numpy and that provides methods for a many use case. so, python is very friendly for web crawling and data manipulation. in python web Scraping done through Scrapy, beautiful soup and selenium.
- Code reusability and shorter code with long process also an big advantage in python that saves our time in effective way.
Process for Scraping data from a website
Web scraping is gaining data from web pages using HTML parsing. Something data is available in CSV or JSON format from some websites, but this is not always the case, causing the use of web scraping.
When run the web scraping code, it sends a request to the URL you mentioned. The server provides the data in response to your request, allowing you to see the HTML or XML page. The code then parses the HTML or XML page, locating and extracting the data from the web page.
Python Framework for scrapping
Selenium
The selenium provide a simple API for writing Selenium WebDriver functional/acceptance tests. You may use the Selenium Python API to access all of Selenium WebDriver’s features simply. selenium framework is used to scrape websites that load content dynamically, like Facebook and Twitter, or if we need to log in or sign up using a click or scroll page action to get to the page that is to be scrapped.
Web Scraping with Selenium allows you to gather all the required data using Selenium Web driver Browser Automation. Selenium crawls the target URL webpage and gathers data at scale.
Scrapy
An open source and collaborative framework for extracting the data you need from websites. In a fast, simple, yet extensible way.
From data mining to monitoring and automated testing, we can use it for a variety of tasks. Scraping hub and a slew of other contributors built and maintain it.
Beautiful Soup
Beautiful Soup is a Python library used for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It provides ways to navigate and search through the parse tree created by parsing the HTML/XML content. While Beautiful Soup can be used to scrape content from websites, it’s essential to keep in mind the legality and ethical considerations surrounding web scraping.
Build your First Web Scrapper in very simple way
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():
Extract Text From HTML With String Methods
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To extract data from a web page’s HTML is to use string methods. For instance, you can implement .find() to search through the text of the HTML for the <title> tags and extract the title of the web page.
Scraping job listing website using Selenium
Pre-requisites:
- Python 2. x or Python 3. x with Selenium libraries installed.
- Google-chrome browser.
Now let’s extract data from the website
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Install Selenium through pip
check selenium version
Import the necessary library for web scraping
Setup Selenium Web-Driver
in this step we have configured chrome selenium web driver. so, required chromedriver.exe fie. Add this exe file as executable path and ready for further web scraping techniques.
Download link for chrome driver exe file
https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html?path=104.0.5112.29/
Before going to the web scraping detailing, just check its syntax and how to target element through X_path
Scrape data from the web-page from various web element and stored into an array
construct the final dataframe.
close the selenium driver.
Display the data frame
you can also hide your index value via .hide_index()
calculate current date and append with xlsx file.
Save the data to Excel File
Finally you can save data in excel file.
