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Getting Started with Web Scraping

Jul 23, 2024

Lecture Notes: Getting Started with Web Scraping

Introduction

  • Presenter: Ishaan Sharma from GeeksforGeeks
  • Topic: Introduction to Web Scraping with Python
  • Format: Tutorial covering requirements, code walkthrough, and demonstration

Requirements and Dependencies

  • Programming Language: Python
  • Essential Libraries:
    • Beautiful Soup
    • Requests

Setting Up the Environment

  1. Create a Python File: scraper.py
  2. Install Beautiful Soup:
  • Search for Beautiful Soup documentation
    • Use pip to install: pip3 install beautifulsoup4
    • For Windows, use pip install beautifulsoup4
  1. Install Requests Module:
  • Use pip to install: pip3 install requests
    • For Windows, use pip install requests

Understanding Web Scraping

  • Definition: Extracting data from websites for various purposes (e.g., price tracking, fetching weather info)
  • Ethics: Ensure the website allows web scraping as not all websites permit this action.

Code Walkthrough

  1. Import Libraries:
import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
  1. Make a Request to a Website:
req = requests.get('https://www.geeksforgeeks.org')
  1. Create an Instance of Beautiful Soup:
soup = BeautifulSoup(req.content, 'html.parser')
  1. Print Parsed Data:
print(soup.prettify())
  1. Extract Specific Text:
print(soup.get_text())
  1. Get Specific Tags (e.g., Title):
title_tag = soup.title print(title_tag.get_text())

Examples and Applications

  • Extracting all text from a webpage
  • Getting the title of the webpage
  • Targeting specific elements by ID or class
  • Downloading images using URLs extracted from the webpage

Conclusion

  • Summary: Basic introduction to web scraping and essential tools
  • Further Reading: Check out GeeksforGeeks blogs on web scraping, Beautiful Soup, requests, parsing
  • Important Note: This tutorial was a basic introduction; there are many advanced features and applications.

Full transcript