Web Scraping Using Python Library

#Python,#WebScraping,#data,#DataScience,#MachineLearning

Beautiful Soup Library

Beautiful soup, it is really a good tool for web scrappers because of its core features. It can help the programmer to quickly extract the data from a certain web page. This library will help us to pull the data out of HTML and XML files. But the problem with Beautiful Soup is it can’t able to do the entire job on its own. this library requires specific modules to work done.

The dependencies of the Beautiful soup are —

1. A library is needed to make a request to the website because it can’t able to make a request to a particular server. To overcome this issue It takes the help of the most popular library named Requests or urlib2. these libraries will help us to make our request to the server.

2. After downloading the HTML, XML data into our local Machine, Beautiful Soup require an External parser to parse the downloaded data. The most famous parsers are — lxml’s XML parser, lxml’s HTML parser, HTML5lib, html.parser.

The advantages of Beautiful soup are —

1. It is easy to learn and master. for example, if we want to extract all the links from the webpage. It can be simply done as follows —

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')

print(soup.prettify())

for link in soup.find_all('a'): # It helps to find all anchor tag's
 print(link.get('href'))

In the above code, we are using the html.parser to parse the content of the html_doc. this is one of the strongest reasons for developers to use Beautiful soup as a web scraping tool.

2. It has good comprehensive documentation which helps us to learn things quickly.

3. It has good community support to figure out the issues that arise while we are working with this library.

When it comes to a small project, Or low-level complex project Beautiful Soup can do the task pretty amazing. It helps us to maintain our code simple and flexible.If you are a beginner and if you want to learn things quickly and want to perform web scraping operations then Beautiful Soup is the best choice.

This library has a lot of dependencies in the ecosystem. This is one of the downsides of this library for a complex project.

Beautiful Soup is pretty slow to perform a certain task but we can overcome this issue with the help of the Multithreading concept but However, the programmer needs to know the concept of multithreading very effectively. This is the downside of Beautiful Soup.