A while ago I was trying to make some analysis on a Medium publication for a personal project. However, data acquisition was a problem because only scraping the publication’s home page does not ensure you get all the data you want.

That’s when I find out that each publication has its own archive. You just have to type “/archive” after the publication URL. You can even specify a year, month, and day and find all the stories published on that date. Something like this:

https://publicationURL/archive/year/month/day

And suddenly the problem was solved. A very simple scraper would do the job. In this tutorial, we’ll see how to code a simple but powerful web scraper that can be used in any Medium publication. Also, the concept of this scraper can be used to scrape data from lots of different websites for whatever reason you want to.

As we’re scraping a Medium publication, nothing better than use The Startup for as an example. According to them, The Startup is the largest active Medium publication with over 700k followers and therefore it should be a great source of data. In this article, you’ll see how to scrape all the articles published by them in 2019 and how this data can be useful.

Web Scraping

Web scraping is the process of collecting data from websites using automatized scripts. It consists of three main steps: fetching the page, parsing the HTML, and extracting the information you need.

The third step is the one that can be a little tricky at first. It consists basically of finding the parts of the HTML the contain the information you want. You can find this by opening the page you want to scrape and pressing the F12 key on your keyboard. Then you can select an element of the page to inspect. You can see this in the image below.

Then all you need to do is to use the tags and classes in the HTML to inform the scraper where to find the information. You need to do it for every part of the page you want to scrape. You can see it better in the code.

#python #medium