Python Web Scripting Tutorial Notes

Jul 25, 2024

Python Web Scripting Tutorial

Introduction

  • Special Python tutorial on web scripting
  • Thanks to FreeCodeCamp for the opportunity
  • Mention of personal YouTube channel: Gymshape Coding
  • Topics include programming languages, web development, etc.

What is Web Scripting?

  • Using the Beautiful Soup library to gather information from websites
  • Can scrape data from various types of websites (e.g., job postings, Wikipedia, etc.)

Agenda

  1. Scrape a basic HTML page
  2. Move to scrapping a real website
  3. Store pulled information

Understanding HTML Structure

  • Basic components of HTML:
    • <html>, <head>, <body> tags
  • Explanation of tags used:
    • <h1>, <h5> for headers
    • <div> for sections styled as cards
    • <a> tag for links
  • JavaScript tags (<script>) are not relevant for HTML scraping

Starting with Beautiful Soup

  1. Install Libraries:
    • Install Beautiful Soup: pip install beautifulsoup4
    • Install lxml parser: pip install lxml
  2. Importing the Libraries:
    • from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
  3. Read HTML Content:
    • Use with open(...) to read home.html file
    • Use the read() method to extract content

Using Beautiful Soup to Scrape Content

  • Create Beautiful Soup instance: soup = BeautifulSoup(content, 'lxml')
  • Use soup.prettify() to print the formatted HTML
  • Find specific tags with soup.find() and soup.find_all() methods
    • Example: Extract all h5 tags and display course names
  • Iterating over retrieved tags

Real World Application

  • Use browser inspect feature to examine HTML structure
  • Scraping a website for specific elements (e.g., job post prices)
  • Demonstrating scraping skills requirements from job posts
  • Examples of filtering received job posts based on published date

Automation with Python Requests Library

  • Install Requests: pip install requests
  • Use Requests to fetch HTML from websites using requests.get(url)
  • Create Beautiful Soup instance for dynamically fetched content

Final Touches

  • Print results in a structured way (Company name, required skills)
  • Use input() to add user filter for unfamiliar skills
  • Save job details in text files for each post
  • Introduce delays in execution with time.sleep()
  • Wrapping the program logic in a while loop for continuous updates

Conclusion

  • Overview of what was covered in the tutorial
  • Encouragement to explore more about web scraping
  • Request to subscribe for future content and tutorials

Additional Notes

  • Challenge to refine code by taking multiple skill inputs.

Key Takeaways

  • Basic understanding of HTML structure and web scraping techniques
  • Familiarity with Beautiful Soup and Requests libraries for scraping
  • The ability to extract and manipulate web data programmatically
  • Continuous monitoring and capturing of relevant job data from web sources.