Problem 8 – web scraping in Python
When you’re faced with a scenario where you need to collect data – be it for a machine learning model, in-depth analysis, or any other data-driven task – a common challenge is sourcing this data. Often, the data you need is spread across the web, hidden within the structure of websites. In this section, we’ll dive deep into the world of web scraping using Python, exploring the best practices, tools, and techniques that cater to both beginners and experienced developers. One of the processes by which we obtain this data is called web scraping.
Let’s create a simple web scraping example using Python, where we’ll scrape quotes from the website at http://quotes.toscrape.com. This example uses the requests library to make HTTP requests and the Beautiful Soup library to parse HTML.
Here’s a basic example that scrapes quotes and authors from the first page:
