Step-by-step Web Scraping Process

By Author: Mindbowser
Total Articles: 16
Comment this article

Web scraping is about extracting data from websites by parsing their HTML. On some sites, data is available easily to download in CSV or JSON format, but in some cases that’s not possible for that, we need web scraping.

How Is Web Scraping Done?
We can do web scraping with Python.

Scrapy
Beautiful Soup
Selenium
Scrapy
Scrapy is a fast high-level web crawling and web scraping framework used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It can be used for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing. It is developed & maintained by Scrapinghub and many other contributors.

Scrapy is the best out of the two because in it we have to focus mostly on parsing the webpage HTML structure and not on sending requests and getting HTML content from the response, in Scrapy that part is done by Scrapy we have to only mention the website URL.

A Scrapy project can also be hosted on Scrapinghub, we can set a schedule for when to run a scraper.

Beautiful Soup
Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of ...
... HTML and XML files. It works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work.
To scrape a website with Beautiful Soup we also need to use the requests library to send requests to the website and get the response and then get HTML content from that response and pass it to the Beautiful Soup object for parsing.

Selenium
Selenium Python bindings provide a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. Through Selenium Python API you can access all functionalities of Selenium WebDriver in an intuitive way.

Selenium is used to scrape websites that load content dynamically like Facebook, Twitter, etc. or if we have to perform a click or scroll page action to log in or signup to get to the page that has to be scrapped.

Selenium can be used with Scrapy and Beautiful Soup after the site has loaded the dynamically generated content we can get access to the HTML of that site through selenium and pass it to Scrapy or beautiful soup and perform the same operations.

To read more visit:- https://www.mindbowser.com/step-by-step-web-scraping-process/