Web Scraping With Python Using Beautiful Soup

Learn web scraping with Python in five minutes

This article is focused on web scraping using Python. We’re going to use the Beautiful Soup 4 library. The article intends to detail the simple steps required to scrape data from a webpage. We’ll be writing sample code to extract data from the website.

Let’s take a look at the required Python libraries:

1. The request library to make network requests

To scrape data from a website, we need to extract the content of the webpage. Once the request is made to a website, the entire content of the webpage is available, and we can then evaluate the web content to extract data out from it. The content is made available in the form of plain text.

2. Thehtml5lib library for parsing HTML

Once the content is available, we need to specify the library that represents the parsing logic for the text available. We’ll be using the html5lib library to parse the text content to HTML DOM-based representation.

3. Thebeautifulsoup4 library for navigating the HTML tree structure

beautifulsoup4 takes the raw text content and parsing library as the input parameters. In our example, we have exposed html5lib as a parsing library. It can then be…