Web Scraping: What is it and what is it used for?

Find out how Web Scraping can help you with your routine tasks

Surely you have ever had to collect information from a website manually by copying and pasting text many times, or maybe you have had to fill out the same forms over and over again, no doubt these are exhausting and boring tasks.

Did you know that you can automate these processes by creating a process that does it for you?

On this occasion, we are going to learn what Web Scraping is and its usefulness.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is a technique used to extract information from web pages in an automated way through software programs that simulate the navigation of a human on the web either by using the HTTP protocol manually or by embedding a browser in an application.

In short, it’s a program developed to browse and do what you would do on the web. It’s great.

The Web Scraping process

This would be the general web scraping process described in simple steps:

• Identify the target website.
• Collect the URLs of the pages from which you want to extract data.