Web scraping is a very powerful tool to learn for any data professional. With web scraping the entire internet becomes your database. In this repository how to parse a web page into a data file (csv) using a Python package called BeautifulSoup Two ways to extract data from a website:
Sadly, not all websites provide an API
Web Scraping: Web scraping is an automated method used to extract useful information from the websites focuses on the transformation of unstructured data (HTML format) on the web into structured data.
STEPS: To extract data using web scraping with python,you need to follow these basic steps:
- Find the URL that you want to scrape
- Check wheather is it legal to scrap from that website Goto www.URL/robots.txt if you are using Scrapy you no need to worry because it automatically allow only Legal links. in Settings.py ROBOTSTXT_OBEY=False
- Inspecting the Website
- Find the data you want to extract
- Write the code
- Run the code and extract the data
- Store the data in the required format
- Price Comparison: Services such as ParseHub use web scraping to collect data from online shopping websites and use it to compare the prices of products.
- Email address gathering: Many companies that use email as a medium for marketing, use web scraping to collect email ID and then send bulk emails.
- travel recommendation: Scraping a few travel recommendation sites, pull out comments about various do to things and see which property is getting a lot of positive responses from the users! The list of use cases is endless.
- Social Media Scraping: Web scraping is used to collect data from Social Media websites such as Twitter to find out what’s trending.
- Research and Development: Web scraping is used to collect a large set of data (Statistics, General Information, Temperature, etc.) from websites, which are analyzed and used to carry out Surveys or for R&D.
- Job listings: Details regarding job openings, interviews are collected from different websites and then listed in one place so that it is easily accessible to the user.
To know whether a website allows web scraping or not, you can look at the website’s “robots.txt” file. You can find this file by appending “/robots.txt” to the URL that you want to scrape.