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
  • Install from python.org
• 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

3. 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

2. Make a Request to a Website:

req = requests.get('https://www.geeksforgeeks.org')

3. Create an Instance of Beautiful Soup:

soup = BeautifulSoup(req.content, 'html.parser')

4. Print Parsed Data:

print(soup.prettify())

5. Extract Specific Text:

print(soup.get_text())

6. 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.