

We are sorry to see that for two reasons. IMPORTANT UPDATE : Book Depository has unfortunately closed. In this article, we’ll work with Book Depository’s first page of its bestsellers list. Now, our setup for web scraping is complete, so let’s scrape our first page, shall we? Scraping your first web page Let’s install this library, too: sudo -H pip3 install requests With Requests – wait for it – we can request web pages from websites. Nice! One more thing is needed for us to start scraping the web, and it’s the Requests library. Throughout this article, we’ll use lxml, so let’s install it (also from the command line): sudo -H pip3 install lxml It is often recommended to use lxml for speed, but if you have other preferences (like Python’s built-in html.parser), then feel free to go with that. To get the full Beautiful Soup experience, you’ll also need to install a parser.

#BEAUTIFUL SOUP PYTHON WEB SCRAPING HOW TO#
Note: if you don’t have a server for your data projects yet, please go through this tutorial first: How to Install Python, SQL, R and Bash (for non-devs) You can install it in the usual way from the command line: sudo -H pip3 install beautifulsoup4 To accomplish this, you’ll also have to make use of a little bit of your pandas and Python knowledge.īut enough talking now, let’s walk the walk! 🙂 Meet your new best friends: Beautiful Soup and Requestsīeautiful Soup is one of the most commonly used Python libraries for web scraping. You’ll do that by extracting data from Book Depository’s bestsellers page. In this article you’ll learn the basics of how to pull data out of HTML. To put it simply, web scraping is the automated collection of data from websites (to be more precise, from the HTML content of websites).

Be it a hobby project or a freelance job, when APIs are just not available, one of your best options is web scraping… And one of the best web scraping tools is Beautiful Soup! What is web scraping? As a data scientist or data analyst, sooner or later you’ll come to a point where you have to collect large amounts of data.
