Web Scraping with Python
Imagine you have to pull a large amount of data from websites and you want to do it as quickly as possible. How would you do it without manually going to each website and getting the data? Well, “Web Scraping” is the answer. Web Scraping just makes this job easier and faster.
In this article on Web Scraping with Python, you will learn about web scraping in brief and see how to extract data from a website with a demonstration. I will be covering the following topics:
- Why is Web Scraping Used?
- What Is Web Scraping?
- Is Web Scraping Legal?
- Why is Python Good For Web Scraping?
- How Do You Scrape Data From A Website?
- Libraries used for Web Scraping
- Web Scraping Example : Scraping Flipkart Website
Why is Web Scraping Used?
Web scraping is used to collect large information from websites. But why does someone have to collect such large data from websites? To know about this, let’s look at the applications of web scraping:
- Price Comparison: Services such as ParseHub use web scraping to collect data from online shopping websites and use it to compare the prices of products.
- Email address gathering: Many companies that use email as a medium for marketing, use web scraping to collect email ID and then send bulk emails.
- Social Media Scraping: Web scraping is used to collect data from Social Media websites such as Twitter to find out what’s trending.
- Research and Development: Web scraping is used to collect a large set of data (Statistics, General Information, Temperature, etc.) from websites, which are analyzed and used to carry out Surveys or for R&D.
- Job listings: Details regarding job openings, interviews are collected from different websites and then listed in one place so that it is easily accessible to the user.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is an automated method used to extract large amounts of data from websites. The data on the websites are unstructured. Web scraping helps collect these unstructured data and store it in a structured form. There are different ways to scrape websites such as online Services, APIs or writing your own code. In this article, we’ll see how to implement web scraping with python.
Is Web Scraping Legal?
Talking about whether web scraping is legal or not, some websites allow web scraping and some don’t. To know whether a website allows web scraping or not, you can look at the website’s “robots.txt” file. You can find this file by appending “/robots.txt” to the URL that you want to scrape. For this example, I am scraping Flipkart website. So, to see the “robots.txt” file, the URL is
