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Implementing Web Scraping in Python With Beautifulsoup

This document discusses implementing web scraping in Python using Beautiful Soup. It describes sending an HTTP request to access a webpage's HTML content, parsing the HTML with Beautiful Soup to create a nested structure, and then navigating and searching the parsed tree to extract useful data like quotes from a webpage. The quotes are extracted by finding specific HTML elements, then stored in a dictionary and written to a CSV file.

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71 views

Implementing Web Scraping in Python With Beautifulsoup

This document discusses implementing web scraping in Python using Beautiful Soup. It describes sending an HTTP request to access a webpage's HTML content, parsing the HTML with Beautiful Soup to create a nested structure, and then navigating and searching the parsed tree to extract useful data like quotes from a webpage. The quotes are extracted by finding specific HTML elements, then stored in a dictionary and written to a CSV file.

Uploaded by

VêRmã Sàáb
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Implementing Web Scraping in Python with

BeautifulSoup
 Difficulty Level : Medium

There are mainly two ways to extract data from a website:


 Use the API of the website (if it exists). For example, Facebook has the
Facebook Graph API which allows retrieval of data posted on Facebook.
 Access the HTML of the webpage and extract useful information/data from it.
This technique is called web scraping or web harvesting or web data extraction.
This article discusses the steps involved in web scraping using the implementation of a
Web Scraping framework of Python called Beautiful Soup.
Steps involved in web scraping:
1. Send an HTTP request to the URL of the webpage you want to access. The
server responds to the request by returning the HTML content of the webpage.
For this task, we will use a third-party HTTP library for python-requests.
2. Once we have accessed the HTML content, we are left with the task of parsing
the data. Since most of the HTML data is nested, we cannot extract data simply
through string processing. One needs a parser which can create a nested/tree
structure of the HTML data. There are many HTML parser libraries available
but the most advanced one is html5lib.
3. Now, all we need to do is navigating and searching the parse tree that we
created, i.e. tree traversal. For this task, we will be using another third-party
python library, Beautiful Soup. It is a Python library for pulling data out of
HTML and XML files.
Step 1: Installing the required third-party libraries
 Easiest way to install external libraries in python is to use pip. pip is a package
management system used to install and manage software packages written in
Python.
All you need to do is:
pip install requests
pip install html5lib
pip install bs4
 Another way is to download them manually from these links:
 requests
 html5lib
 beautifulsoup4
Step 2: Accessing the HTML content from webpage
import requests

URL = "https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/data-structures/"

r = requests.get(URL)

print(r.content)

Let us try to understand this piece of code.


 First of all import the requests library.
 Then, specify the URL of the webpage you want to scrape.
 Send a HTTP request to the specified URL and save the response from server
in a response object called r.

 Now, as print r.content to get the raw HTML content of the webpage. It is of


‘string’ type.
Step 3: Parsing the HTML content

#This will not run on online IDE

import requests

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

  

URL = "http://www.values.com/inspirational-quotes"

r = requests.get(URL)

  

soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, 'html5lib') # If this line causes an error, run 'pip install html5lib' or install
html5lib

print(soup.prettify())
A really nice thing about the BeautifulSoup library is that it is built on the top of the
HTML parsing libraries like html5lib, lxml, html.parser, etc. So  BeautifulSoup object
and specify the parser library can be created at the same time.
In the example above,
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, 'html5lib')
We create a BeautifulSoup object by passing two arguments:
 r.content : It is the raw HTML content.
 html5lib : Specifying the HTML parser we want to use.
Now soup.prettify() is printed, it gives the visual representation of the parse tree created
from the raw HTML content.
Step 4: Searching and navigating through the parse tree
Now, we would like to extract some useful data from the HTML content. The soup object
contains all the data in the nested structure which could be programmatically extracted. In
our example, we are scraping a webpage consisting of some quotes. So, we would like to
create a program to save those quotes (and all relevant information about them).

#Python program to scrape website 

#and save quotes from website

import requests

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import csv

   

URL = "http://www.values.com/inspirational-quotes"

r = requests.get(URL)

   

soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, 'html5lib')


   

quotes=[]  # a list to store quotes

   

table = soup.find('div', attrs = {'id':'all_quotes'}) 

   

for row in table.findAll('div',

                         attrs = {'class':'col-6 col-lg-3 text-center margin-30px-bottom sm-margin-30px-top'}):

    quote = {}

    quote['theme'] = row.h5.text

    quote['url'] = row.a['href']

    quote['img'] = row.img['src']

    quote['lines'] = row.img['alt'].split(" #")[0]

    quote['author'] = row.img['alt'].split(" #")[1]

    quotes.append(quote)

   

filename = 'inspirational_quotes.csv'

with open(filename, 'w', newline='') as f:

    w = csv.DictWriter(f,['theme','url','img','lines','author'])

    w.writeheader()
    for quote in quotes:

        w.writerow(quote)

Before moving on, we recommend you to go through the HTML content of the webpage
which we printed using soup.prettify() method and try to find a pattern or a way to
navigate to the quotes.
 It is noticed that all the quotes are inside a div container whose id is
‘all_quotes’. So, we find that div element (termed as table in above code)
using find() method :
table = soup.find('div', attrs = {'id':'all_quotes'})
The first argument is the HTML tag you want to search and second argument is
a dictionary type element to specify the additional attributes associated with
that tag. find() method returns the first matching element. You can try to
print table.prettify() to get a sense of what this piece of code does.
 Now, in the table element, one can notice that each quote is inside a div
container whose class is quote. So, we iterate through each div container whose
class is quote.
Here, we use findAll() method which is similar to find method in terms of
arguments but it returns a list of all matching elements. Each quote is now
iterated using a variable called row.
Here is one sample row HTML content for better understanding:

Now consider this piece of code:


 for row in table.find_all_next('div', attrs = {'class': 'col-6 col-lg-3 text-center margin-
30px-bottom sm-margin-30px-top'}):
 quote = {}
 quote['theme'] = row.h5.text
 quote['url'] = row.a['href']
 quote['img'] = row.img['src']
 quote['lines'] = row.img['alt'].split(" #")[0]
 quote['author'] = row.img['alt'].split(" #")[1]
quotes.append(quote)
We create a dictionary to save all information about a quote. The nested
structure can be accessed using dot notation. To access the text inside an
HTML element, we use .text :
quote['theme'] = row.h5.text
We can add, remove, modify and access a tag’s attributes. This is done by
treating the tag as a dictionary:
quote['url'] = row.a['href']
Lastly, all the quotes are appended to the list called quotes.
 Finally, we would like to save all our data in some CSV file.
 filename = 'inspirational_quotes.csv'
 with open(filename, 'w', newline='') as f:
 w = csv.DictWriter(f,['theme','url','img','lines','author'])
 w.writeheader()
 for quote in quotes:
w.writerow(quote)
Here we create a CSV file called inspirational_quotes.csv and save all the
quotes in it for any further use.

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