Scrape the Internet with Python in 2 minutes

Learn how to scrape the web using BeautifulSoap and Selenium

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Web scraping is a technique used to extract data from websites. There are several libraries available in Python that make web scraping easier, including BeautifulSoup and Selenium.

Let’s look at the basics of web scraping using these two libraries.

BeautifulSoup

BeautifulSoup is a Python library that is used for web scraping purposes to parse HTML and XML documents. It can be used to extract data from a website’s HTML code, making it an ideal tool for web scraping.

Here’s a code snippet to demonstrate how to use BeautifulSoup to extract data from a website:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "https://www.example.com"
res = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(res.text, "html.parser")

# Extract data from HTML code
title = soup.find("title").text
print(title)

Selenium

Selenium is a tool for automating web browsers. It is used to simulate human interaction with a website, making it an ideal tool for web scraping when a website uses dynamic content or requires authentication.