Quick Guide: Web Scraping with Python
in 5 Minutes
Author: Alex Digital Explorer
Introduction
This guide will teach you the basics of web scraping using
Python's requests and beautifulsoup4 libraries. You'll learn how to
extract data from a webpage in just a few steps.
Prerequisites
Python 3 installed on your computer.
Install required libraries by running in your command prompt:
text
pip install requests beautifulsoup4
Step-by-Step Code
1. Fetch the Webpage
We'll use the requests library to get the HTML content of a page.
python
import requests
url = 'https://example.com' # Replace with a target URL
response = requests.get(url)
# Check if the request was successful
if response.status_code == 200:
html_content = response.text
else:
print('Failed to retrieve the webpage')
2. Parse the HTML
Now, we use BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML into a readable
structure.
python
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, 'html.parser')
3. Extract Data
Let's find and print all the headings (<h1>) on the page.
python
headings = soup.find_all('h1')
for heading in headings:
print(heading.get_text())
4. Extract Links
To find all links (<a> tags) on the page:
python
links = soup.find_all('a')
for link in links:
print(link.get('href'))
Important Notes & Ethics
Always
respect robots.txt: Check https://example.com/robots.txt to see if
the website allows scraping.
Do not overload servers: Add delays between your
requests.
Use data responsibly: This guide is for educational
purposes only. Do not scrape copyrighted or personal data
without permission.
Conclusion
You've now learned the fundamentals of web scraping with Python.
Explore further by practicing on websites that allow scraping!
This document is created for educational purposes and sharing on
knowledge platforms.
