An overview of data scraping Python & its popularity
Web scraping is quite popular these days because of the numerous upgraded open source libraries, data extraction tools & visual scraping tools. With the help of these tools, you can quickly scrap the data from different websites. These tools are specially used in those places where scale and quality matters a lot. In this article, you will learn about data scraping python in brief. So, let’s start with the basics.
Introduction of web scraping
Web scraping is a method to scrap or extract a large amount of data from websites. All the visible data on the website ate unstructured, and it takes a lot of time if you are trying to collect it manually. That’s why to save your time and efforts; data scraping tools are using. With numerous tools, you can manage the unstructured data and store it in a structured form.
This method is specially used in the digital business industry. It is helpful for people who are working in technical fields like data scientists & IT experts. There are different ways to collect data from the website. You can achieve data quickly by using online tools & APIs. Most people do web scraping using python code.
Is web scraping legal?
As you read earlier, there is no direct way to download data from the website, and that’s why It experts use data scraping Python. But is web scraping using python legal or not? Well, some companies allow web scraping, but others don’t. So, now the question arises that how can a person know whether a specific website allows web scraping or not? To check this, you can check the website’s “robots.txt” file. To find out this file, you have to add “/robots.txt” to the URL that you want to scrape.
How can I start scraping data from a website?
When you run the code for web scraping, you must search for the website’s “robots.txt” file. Now the request is sent to the URL, and in response, the server sends the data to you. The server allows you to read the HTML or XML page of that website. Now you can extract the data using data scraper chrome and any other tools.
To extract data from any website, you have to follow the below steps:
- Find out the URL of the website that you want to scrap
- Inspect the HTML & XML page
- Find the data you want to extract from the website
- Write code in Python
- Run the code & extract it
- Store the data
Why IT experts use Python for web scraping?
Most IT experts prefer to use python codes for web scraping because it is easy to use and has a vast collection of libraries that can be used for various purposes. In Python, you don’t have to define variables and data types that can save you time and easier than web scraping PHP. These codes are readable and expressive, which anyone can easily understand. The one more important thing is Python has the most prominent active community help group to seek help if you find any issues.
Web scraping can make your work easy and convenient when you use the right tools and strategy. If you are interested in data scraping python, you can collect more ideas about it by browsing the web.