Web scraping is a computer software technique of information, from websites.The variety and quantity of data that is available today through the internet is like a treasure trove of secrets and mysteries waiting to be solved. With the help of web scraping, you can extract data from any website, no matter how large is the data, on your computer.

Use of API’s is the best way to access data from a website. It consists in gathering data available on websites. This can be done manually by a human user or by a bot. The scraper goes onto a web page of the website, gets the relevant data, and move forward to the next web page.

We can understand web-scraping as a pipeline containing 3 components:

1. Downloading: Downloading the HTML webpage
2. Parsing: Parsing the HTML and retrieving data, we’re interested in
3. Storing: Storing the retrieved data in our local machine in a specific format

Every website has a different structure, that is why web scrapers are usually built to explore one website. The two important issues that arise during the implementation of a web scraper are the following:

• What is the structure of the web pages that contain relevant data?
• How can we get to those web pages?

Python supports a library named ‘BeautifulSoup’ for this. BeautifulSoup will be used to parse the HTML files. It is very simple to use and has many features that help in gathering web datas efficiently. Data Science Training provided by Spectrum Softtech Solutions make you a professional in data science with Python, which helps you to boost your career to the next level.

Author: STEPS