A Beginner's Guide to Web Scraping in Python

In this article, you're going to learn the basics of web scraping in python and we'll do a demo project to scrape quotes from a website.

In this article, you're going to learn the basics of web scraping in python and we'll do a demo project to scrape quotes from a website.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is extracting data from a website programmatically. Using web scraping you can extract the text in HTML tags, download images & files and almost do anything you do manually with copying and pasting but in a faster way.

Should you learn web scraping?

Yeah, absolutely as a programmer in many cases you might need to use the content found on other people's websites but those website doesn't give you API to that, that's why you need to learn web scraping to be able to that.

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Web scraping allows us to extract information from web pages. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to perform web scraping with Python and BeautifulSoup.The internet is an absolutely massive source of data. Unfortunately, the vast majority if it isn’t available in conveniently organized CSV files for download and analysis. If you want to capture data from many websites, you’ll need to try web scraping.

Python Programming Tutorials For Beginners

This Python web scraping tutorial provides a step by step approach to scraping the web and analyzing it. You will learn about Beautiful Soup, a library in Python that provides a cleaner way of scraping the web. We'll be scraping data of a table online and utilizing the data to understand various patterns.

Magic Methods are the special methods which gives us the ability to access built in syntactical features such as ‘<’, ‘>’, ‘==’, ‘+’ etc.. You must have worked with such methods without knowing them to be as magic methods. Magic methods can be identified with their names which start with __ and ends with __ like __init__, __call__, __str__ etc. These methods are also called Dunder Methods, because of their name starting and ending with Double Underscore (Dunder).

There is an inordinate amount of data online that is available to be accessed. Knowing how to retrieve and analyze this data is an extremely useful skill to have. In this tutorial, we will use the python requests and Beautiful Soup libraries for quickly web scraping such data.