- Use Beautifulsoup To Scrape
- Web Scraping Using Beautifulsoup
- Web Scraping Using Beautiful Soup And Requests Video
Sometimes we need to extract information from websites. We can extract data from websites by using there available API’s. But there are websites where API’s are not available.
Here, Web scraping comes into play!
Python is widely being used in web scraping, for the ease it provides in writing the core logic. Whether you are a data scientist, developer, engineer or someone who works with large amounts of data, web scraping with Python is of great help.
Without a direct way to download the data, you are left with web scraping in Python as it can extract massive quantities of data without any hassle and within a short period of time.
Prerequisite: Downloading files in Python, Web Scraping with BeautifulSoup. We all know that Python is a very easy programming language but what makes it cool are the great number of open source library written for it. Requests is one of the most widely used library. Advantages of using Requests library to download web files are: One can easily download the web directories by iterating recursively through the website! This is a browser-independent method and much faster! One can simply scrape a web page to get all the file URLs on a webpage and hence, download all files in a single command.
In this tutorial , we shall be looking into scraping using some very powerful Python based libraries like BeautifulSoup and Selenium.
BeautifulSoup and urllib
BeautifulSoup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. But it does not get data directly from a webpage. So here we will use urllib library to extract webpage.
First we need to install Python web scraping BeautifulSoup4 plugin in our system using following command :
$ sudo pip install BeatifulSoup4
$ pip install lxml
OR
$ sudo apt-get install python3-bs4
$ sudo apt-get install python-lxml
So here I am going to extract homepage from a website https://www.botreetechnologies.com
from urllib.request import urlopen
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
We import our package that we are going to use in our program. Now we will extract our webpage using following.
response = urlopen('https://www.botreetechnologies.com/case-studies')
Beautiful Soup does not get data directly from content we just extract. So we need to parse it in html/XML data.
data = BeautifulSoup(response.read(),'lxml')
Here we parsed our webpage html content into XML using lxml parser.
As you can see in our web page there are many case studies available. I just want to read all the case studies available here.
There is a title of case studies at the top and then some details related to that case. I want to extract all that information.
We can extract an element based on tag , class, id , Xpath etc.
You can get class of an element by simply right click on that element and select inspect element.
case_studies = data.find('div', { 'class' : 'content-section' })
In case of multiple elements of this class in our page, it will return only first. So if you want to get all the elements having this class use findAll() method.
case_studies = data.find('div', { 'class' : 'content-section' })
Now we have div having class ‘content-section’ containing its child elements. We will get all <h2> tags to get our ‘TITLE’ and <ul> tag to get all children, the <li> elements.
case_stud.find('h2').find('a').text
case_stud_details = case_stud.find(‘ul’).findAll(‘li’)
Now we got the list of all children of ul element.
To get first element from the children list simply write:
case_stud_details[0]
We can extract all attribute of a element . i.e we can get text for this element by using:
case_stud_details[2].text
But here I want to click on the ‘TITLE’ of any case study and open details page to get all information.
Since we want to interact with the website to get the dynamic content, we need to imitate the normal user interaction. Such behaviour cannot be achieved using BeautifulSoup or urllib, hence we need a webdriver to do this.
Webdriver basically creates a new browser window which we can control pragmatically. It also let us capture the user events like click and scroll.
Selenium is one such webdriver.
Selenium Webdriver
Selenium webdriver accepts cthe ommand and sends them to ba rowser and retrieves results.
You can install selenium in your system using fthe ollowing simple command:
$ sudo pip install selenium
In order to use we need to import selenium in our Python script.
from selenium import webdriver
I am using Firefox webdriver in this tutorial. Now we are ready to extract our webpage and we can do this by using fthe ollowing:
self.url = 'https://www.botreetechnologies.com/'
self.browser = webdriver.Firefox()
Now we need to click on ‘CASE-STUDIES’ to open that page.
We can click on a selenium element by using following piece of code:
self.browser.find_element_by_xpath('//div[contains(@id,'navbar')]/ul[2]/li[1]').click()
Now we are transferred to case-studies page and here all the case studies are listed with some information.
Here, I want to click on each case study and open details page to extract all available information.
So, I created a list of links for all case studies and load them one after the other.
To load previous page you can use following piece of code:
self.browser.execute_script('window.history.go(-1)')
Final script for using Selenium will looks as under:
And we are done, Now you can extract static webpages or interact with webpages using the above script.
Conclusion: Web Scraping Python is an essential Skill to have
Today, more than ever, companies are working with huge amounts of data. Learning how to scrape data in Python web scraping projects will take you a long way. In this tutorial, you learn Python web scraping with beautiful soup.
Along with that, Python web scraping with selenium is also a useful skill. Companies need data engineers who can extract data and deliver it to them for gathering useful insights. You have a high chance of success in data extraction if you are working on Python web scraping projects.
If you want to hire Python developers for web scraping, then contact BoTree Technologies. We have a team of engineers who are experts in web scraping. Give us a call today.
Consulting is free – let us help you grow!
Web scraping, web crawling, html scraping, and any other form of web data extraction can be complicated. Between obtaining the correct page source, to parsing the source correctly, rendering javascript, and obtaining data in a usable form, there’s a lot of work to be done. Different users have very different needs, and there are tools out there for all of them, people who want to build web scrapers without coding, developers who want to build web crawlers to crawl large sites, and everything in between. Here is our list of the 10 best web scraping tools on the market right now, from open source projects to hosted SAAS solutions to desktop software, there is sure to be something for everyone looking to make use of web data!
1. Scraper API
Website: https://www.scraperapi.com/
Who is this for: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call.
Why you should use it: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call. It doesn’t burden you with managing your own proxies, it manages its own internal pool of over a hundreds of thousands of proxies from a dozen different proxy providers, and has smart routing logic that routes requests through different subnets and automatically throttles requests in order to avoid IP bans and CAPTCHAs. It’s the ultimate web scraping service for developers, with special pools of proxies for ecommerce price scraping, search engine scraping, social media scraping, sneaker scraping, ticket scraping and more! If you need to scrape millions of pages a month, you can use this form to ask for a volume discount.
2. ScrapeSimple
Website: https://www.scrapesimple.com
Who is this for: ScrapeSimple is the perfect service for people who want a custom scraper built for them. Web scraping is made as simple as filling out a form with instructions for what kind of data you want.
Why you should use it: ScrapeSimple lives up to its name with a fully managed service that builds and maintains custom web scrapers for customers. Just tell them what information you need from which sites, and they will design a custom web scraper to deliver the information to you periodically (could be daily, weekly, monthly, or whatever) in CSV format directly to your inbox. This service is perfect for businesses that just want a html scraper without needing to write any code themselves. Response times are quick and the service is incredibly friendly and helpful, making this service perfect for people who just want the full data extraction process taken care of for them.
3. Octoparse
Website: https://www.octoparse.com/
Who is this for: Octoparse is a fantastic tool for people who want to extract data from websites without having to code, while still having control over the full process with their easy to use user interface.
Why you should use it: Octoparse is the perfect tool for people who want to scrape websites without learning to code. It features a point and click screen scraper, allowing users to scrape behind login forms, fill in forms, input search terms, scroll through infinite scroll, render javascript, and more. It also includes a site parser and a hosted solution for users who want to run their scrapers in the cloud. Best of all, it comes with a generous free tier allowing users to build up to 10 crawlers for free. For enterprise level customers, they also offer fully customized crawlers and managed solutions where they take care of running everything for you and just deliver the data to you directly.
4. ParseHub
Website: https://www.parsehub.com/
Use Beautifulsoup To Scrape
Who is this for: Parsehub is an incredibly powerful tool for building web scrapers without coding. It is used by analysts, journalists, data scientists, and everyone in between.
Why you should use it: Parsehub is dead simple to use, you can build web scrapers simply by clicking on the data that you want. It then exports the data in JSON or Excel format. It has many handy features such as automatic IP rotation, allowing scraping behind login walls, going through dropdowns and tabs, getting data from tables and maps, and much much more. In addition, it has a generous free tier, allowing users to scrape up to 200 pages of data in just 40 minutes! Parsehub is also nice in that it provies desktop clients for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, so you can use them from your computer no matter what system you’re running.
5. Scrapy
Website: https://scrapy.org
Who is this for: Scrapy is a web scraping library for Python developers looking to build scalable web crawlers. It’s a full on web crawling framework that handles all of the plumbing (queueing requests, proxy middleware, etc.) that makes building web crawlers difficult.
Why you should use it: As an open source tool, Scrapy is completely free. It is battle tested, and has been one of the most popular Python libraries for years, and it’s probably the best python web scraping tool for new applications. It is well documented and there are many tutorials on how to get started. In addition, deploying the crawlers is very simple and reliable, the processes can run themselves once they are set up. As a fully featured web scraping framework, there are many middleware modules available to integrate various tools and handle various use cases (handling cookies, user agents, etc.).
6. Diffbot
Website: https://www.diffbot.com
Who is this for: Enterprises who who have specific data crawling and screen scraping needs, particularly those who scrape websites that often change their HTML structure.
Why you should use it: Diffbot is different from most page scraping tools out there in that it uses computer vision (instead of html parsing) to identify relevant information on a page. This means that even if the HTML structure of a page changes, your web scrapers will not break as long as the page looks the same visually. This is an incredible feature for long running mission critical web scraping jobs. While they may be a bit pricy (the cheapest plan is $299/month), they do a great job offering a premium service that may make it worth it for large customers.
7. Cheerio
Website: https://cheerio.js.org
Who is this for: NodeJS developers who want a straightforward way to parse HTML. Those familiar with jQuery will immediately appreciate the best javascript web scraping syntax available.
Why you should use it: Cheerio offers an API similar to jQuery, so developers familiar with jQuery will immediately feel at home using Cheerio to parse HTML. It is blazing fast, and offers many helpful methods to extract text, html, classes, ids, and more. It is by far the most popular HTML parsing library written in NodeJS, and is probably the best NodeJS web scraping tool or javascript web scraping tool for new projects.
Web Scraping Using Beautifulsoup
8. BeautifulSoup
Website: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
Who is this for: Python developers who just want an easy interface to parse HTML, and don’t necessarily need the power and complexity that comes with Scrapy.
Why you should use it: Like Cheerio for NodeJS developers, Beautiful Soup is by far the most popular HTML parser for Python developers. It’s been around for over a decade now and is extremely well documented, with many web parsing tutorials teaching developers to use it to scrape various websites in both Python 2 and Python 3. If you are looking for a Python HTML parsing library, this is the one you want.
9. Puppeteer
Website: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer
Who is this for: Puppeteer is a headless Chrome API for NodeJS developers who want very granular control over their scraping activity.
Why you should use it: As an open source tool, Puppeteer is completely free. It is well supported and actively being developed and backed by the Google Chrome team itself. It is quickly replacing Selenium and PhantomJS as the default headless browser automation tool. It has a well thought out API, and automatically installs a compatible Chromium binary as part of its setup process, meaning you don’t have to keep track of browser versions yourself. While it’s much more than just a web crawling library, it’s often used to scrape website data from sites that require javascript to display information, it handles scripts, stylesheets, and fonts just like a real browser. Note that while it is a great solution for sites that require javascript to display data, it is very CPU and memory intensive, so using it for sites where a full blown browser is not necessary is probably not a great idea. Most times a simple GET request should do the trick!
10. Mozenda
Website: https://www.mozenda.com/
Who is this for: Enterprises looking for a cloud based self serve webpage scraping platform need look no further. With over 7 billion pages scraped, Mozenda has experience in serving enterprise customers from all around the world.
Why you should use it: Mozenda allows enterprise customers to run web scrapers on their robust cloud platform. They set themselves apart with the customer service (providing both phone and email support to all paying customers). Its platform is highly scalable and will allow for on premise hosting as well. Like Diffbot, they are a bit pricy, and their lowest plans start at $250/month.
Honorable Mention 1. Kimura
Web Scraping Using Beautiful Soup And Requests Video
Website: https://github.com/vifreefly/kimuraframework
Who is this for: Kimura is an open source web scraping framework written in Ruby, it makes it incredibly easy to get a Ruby web scraper up and running.
Why you should use it: Kimura is quickly becoming known as the best Ruby web scraping library, as it’s designed to work with headless Chrome/Firefox, PhantomJS, and normal GET requests all out of the box. It’s syntax is similar to Scrapy and developers writing Ruby web scrapers will love all of the nice configuration options to do things like set a delay, rotate user agents, and set default headers.
Honorable Mention 2. Goutte
Website: https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/Goutte
Who is this for: Goutte is an open source web crawling framework written in PHP, it makes it super easy extract data from the HTML/XML responses using PHP.
Why you should use it: Goutte is a very straight forward, no frills framework that is considered by many to be the best PHP web scraping library, as it’s designed for simplicity, handling the vast majority of HTML/XML use cases without too much additional cruft. It also seamlessly integrates with the excellent Guzzle requests library, which allows you to customize the framework for more advanced use cases.
The open web is by far the greatest global repository for human knowledge, there is almost no information that you can’t find through extracting web data. Because web scraping is done by many people of various levels of technical ability and know how, there are many tools available that service everyone from people who don’t want to write any code to seasoned developers just looking for the best open source solution in their language of choice.
Hopefully, this list of tools has been helpful in letting you take advantage of this information for your own projects and businesses. If you have any web scraping jobs you would like to discuss with us, please contact us here. Happy scraping!