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Building a web scraper with Requests

Web scraping is a useful skill for anyone looking to collect data from the internet. In this tutorial, we will cover how to build a simple web scraper using the Python Requests library.

Pre-requisites​

Before we get started, make sure to have Python installed on your system. If you don't have it, download it from python.org. Next, you'll need to install the requests and beautifulsoup4 libraries. You can install them using pip:

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

The Basics​

First, let's understand what a web scraper is. A web scraper is a tool that extracts information from websites. We can use the Python requests library to send HTTP requests and BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML response.

Making a Request​

Let's start by making a GET request to a website. For this tutorial, we'll be scraping data from example.com.

import requests

response = requests.get('http://example.com')
print(response.text)

Here, requests.get() sends a GET request to the provided URL and returns a Response object. response.text contains the server's response to our request.

Parsing HTML with BeautifulSoup​

Now that we have the HTML content of the page, we can parse it to extract useful information. We'll use BeautifulSoup for this task.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
print(soup.prettify())

Here, BeautifulSoup() takes the HTML content as its first argument and the parser library to be used as its second argument. soup.prettify() will print the parsed HTML in a nicely formatted way.

Extracting Information​

After parsing the HTML, we can use BeautifulSoup's methods to find specific elements. For example, to find all the paragraphs in the page:

paragraphs = soup.find_all('p')
for paragraph in paragraphs:
    print(paragraph.text)

Here, soup.find_all() returns a list of all the tags that match the given identifier, and paragraph.text gives the text content of the paragraph.

Wrapping Up​

In this tutorial, we learned how to create a simple web scraper with Python's requests library and BeautifulSoup. We first sent a GET request to a website, parsed the HTML response with BeautifulSoup, and then extracted specific information.

Remember that while web scraping can be a powerful tool, it's important to use it responsibly. Always respect the website's robots.txt file and don't overload the server with too many requests.

Keep practicing and exploring different websites and their HTML structures. Happy Scraping!