#pythonprogramming #python #webscraping

What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is simply the act of gathering data from specifies or multiple sources on the internet. We scrape the web everyday, it doesn’t even have to be complex, gathering a top 10 list from forbes counts as web scraping. In the world of programming, when you hear the word web scraping, it no longer has to do with any manual method. Automated Web scraping is the act of gathering data automatically from a specific source or multiple sources across the internet.

Why do we scrape the web?
So why would anyone want to scrape the web? There are tons of scenarios that would lead to web scraping. First of all, it eliminates the stress of manually going to multiple websites to get information. You could simply write a program to do this for you and send the data to your email every morning. Some jobs also require regular data collection and web scraping could simplify a lot of things. Imagine building a Job Scraper that could help you scrape available jobs from multiple sources and send them to you every morning. So web scraping is a very cool and important part of many people’s day to day lives.

Is Web Scraping Legal?
This is a very good question and it all comes down to the kind of website you’re scraping. Some web owners be it an individual or organisation do not mind their websites being scraped while others forbid it. Once you dive into web scraping, you’ll notice some web owners actually take active measures to ensure people cannot scrape their websites. If you’re scraping a website privately for personal reasons, you may probably not run into any issues. If however you are planning on something on a larger scale, I’ll advise you to read the terms and conditions of any website you intend to scrape.

Web Scraping With Python
Python is one of the best programming languages there and most used too. It is the ideal choice for web scraping because of the powerful libraries that come with python. Tools like requests, lxml, beautifulsoup among others help to easily read and extract data from websites. There are many ways or tools to scrape the web using python but the three major and most tools ways are:

1. BeautifulSoup

2. Selenium

3. Scrapy

Read more- https://techranter.com/web-scraping-with-beautiful-soup-and-python/