Web scraping is the technique to extract data from a website.
The module BeautifulSoup is designed for web scraping. The BeautifulSoup module can handle HTML and XML. It provides simple method for searching, navigating and modifying the parse tree.
We can get data from web pages with Beautiful Soup. “Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup — Attributes and Strings” is published by John Au-Yeung in Dev Genius. Beautiful Soup sits on top of popular Python parsers like lxml and html5lib, allowing you to try out different parsing strategies or trade speed for flexibility. Basically, BeautifulSoup can parse anything on the web you give it. Here’s a simple example of BeautifulSoup. Beautiful Soup: Beautiful Soup is a library (a set of pre-writen code) that give us methods to extract data from websites via web scraping Web Scraping: A technique to extract data from websites. With that in mind, we are going to install Beautiful Soup to scrap a website, Best CD Price to fetch the data and store it into a.csv file.
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Browser Automation with Python Selenium
Get links from website
The example below prints all links on a webpage:
It downloads the raw html code with the line:
A BeautifulSoup object is created and we use this object to find all links:
Extract links from website into array
Beautiful Soup Web Scraping Example Free
To store the links in an array you can use:Function to extract links from webpage
If you repeatingly extract links you can use the function below:
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Browser Automation with Python Selenium
Beautiful Soup Web Scraping Example Using
APIs are not always available. Sometimes you have to scrape data from a webpage yourself. Luckily the modules Pandas and Beautifulsoup can help!
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Web scraping
Pandas has a neat concept known as a DataFrame. A DataFrame can hold data and be easily manipulated. We can combine Pandas with Beautifulsoup to quickly get data from a webpage.
If you find a table on the web like this:
We can convert it to JSON with:
And in a browser get the beautiful json output:
Converting to lists
Rows can be converted to Python lists.
We can convert it to a dataframe using just a few lines:
Pretty print pandas dataframe
You can convert it to an ascii table with the module tabulate.
This code will instantly convert the table on the web to an ascii table:
This will show in the terminal as: