How To Scrape Websites With Python and BeautifulSoup PDF
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How to scrape websites with Python
and BeautifulSoup
Justin Yek
Jun 10, 2017 · 8 min read
There is more information on the Internet than any human can absorb in a lifetime.
What you need is not access to that information, but a scalable way to collect, organize,
and analyze it.
You need web scraping.
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Web scraping automatically extracts data and presents it in a format you can easily
make sense of. In this tutorial, we’ll focus on its applications in the financial market,
but web scraping can be used in a wide variety of situations.
If you’re an avid investor, getting closing prices every day can be a pain, especially
when the information you need is found across several webpages. We’ll make data
extraction easier by building a web scraper to retrieve stock indices automatically from
the Internet.
Getting Started
We are going to use Python as our scraping language, together with a simple and
powerful library, BeautifulSoup.
For Mac users, Python is pre-installed in OS X. Open up Terminal and type python -
-version . You should see your python version is 2.7.x.
For Windows users, please install Python through the official website.
Next we need to get the BeautifulSoup library using pip , a package management tool
for Python.
In the terminal, type:
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easy_install pip
pip install BeautifulSoup4
Note: If you fail to execute the above command line, try adding sudo in front of each
line.
The Basics
Before we start jumping into the code, let’s understand the basics of HTML and some
rules of scraping.
HTML tags
If you already understand HTML tags, feel free to skip this part.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<h1> First Scraping </h1>
<p> Hello World </p>
<body>
</html>
This is the basic syntax of an HTML webpage. Every <tag> serves a block inside the
webpage:
1. <!DOCTYPE html> : HTML documents must start with a type declaration.
2. The HTML document is contained between <html> and </html> .
3. The meta and script declaration of the HTML document is between <head> and
</head> .
4. The visible part of the HTML document is between <body> and </body> tags.
5. Title headings are defined with the <h1> through <h6> tags.
6. Paragraphs are defined with the <p> tag.
Other useful tags include <a> for hyperlinks, <table> for tables, <tr> for table rows,
and <td> for table columns.
Also, HTML tags sometimes come with id or class attributes. The id attribute
specifies a unique id for an HTML tag and the value must be unique within the HTML
document. The class attribute is used to define equal styles for HTML tags with the
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same class. We can make use of these ids and classes to help us locate the data we
want.
For more information on HTML tags, id and class, please refer to W3Schools Tutorials.
Scraping Rules
1. You should check a website’s Terms and Conditions before you scrape it. Be careful
to read the statements about legal use of data. Usually, the data you scrape should
not be used for commercial purposes.
2. Do not request data from the website too aggressively with your program (also
known as spamming), as this may break the website. Make sure your program
behaves in a reasonable manner (i.e. acts like a human). One request for one
webpage per second is good practice.
3. The layout of a website may change from time to time, so make sure to revisit the
site and rewrite your code as needed
Inspecting the Page
Let’s take one page from the Bloomberg Quote website as an example.
As someone following the stock market, we would like to get the index name (S&P 500)
and its price from this page. First, right-click and open your browser’s inspector to
inspect the webpage.
Try hovering your cursor on the price and you should be able to see a blue box
surrounding it. If you click it, the related HTML will be selected in the browser console.
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From the result, we can see that the price is inside a few levels of HTML tags, which is
<div class="basic-quote"> → <div class="price-container up"> → <div
class="price"> .
Similarly, if you hover and click the name “S&P 500 Index”, it is inside <div
class="basic-quote"> and <h1 class="name"> .
Now we know the unique location of our data with the help of class tags.
Jump into the Code
Now that we know where our data is, we can start coding our web scraper. Open your
text editor now!
First, we need to import all the libraries that we are going to use.
# import libraries
import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
Next, declare a variable for the url of the page.
# specify the url
quote_page = ‘http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SPX:IND'
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Then, make use of the Python urllib2 to get the HTML page of the url declared.
# query the website and return the html to the variable ‘page’
page = urllib2.urlopen(quote_page)
Finally, parse the page into BeautifulSoup format so we can use BeautifulSoup to work
on it.
# parse the html using beautiful soup and store in variable `soup`
soup = BeautifulSoup(page, ‘html.parser’)
Now we have a variable, soup , containing the HTML of the page. Here’s where we can
start coding the part that extracts the data.
Remember the unique layers of our data? BeautifulSoup can help us get into these
layers and extract the content with find() . In this case, since the HTML class name is
unique on this page, we can simply query <div class="name"> .
# Take out the <div> of name and get its value
name_box = soup.find(‘h1’, attrs={‘class’: ‘name’})
After we have the tag, we can get the data by getting its text .
name = name_box.text.strip() # strip() is used to remove starting
and trailing
print name
Similarly, we can get the price too.
# get the index price
price_box = soup.find(‘div’, attrs={‘class’:’price’})
price = price_box.text
print price
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When you run the program, you should be able to see that it prints out the current
price of the S&P 500 Index.
Export to Excel CSV
Now that we have the data, it is time to save it. The Excel Comma Separated Format is a
nice choice. It can be opened in Excel so you can see the data and process it easily.
But first, we have to import the Python csv module and the datetime module to get the
record date. Insert these lines to your code in the import section.
import csv
from datetime import datetime
At the bottom of your code, add the code for writing data to a csv file.
# open a csv file with append, so old data will not be erased
with open(‘index.csv’, ‘a’) as csv_file:
writer = csv.writer(csv_file)
writer.writerow([name, price, datetime.now()])
Now if you run your program, you should able to export an index.csv file, which you
can then open with Excel, where you should see a line of data.
So if you run this program everyday, you will be able to easily get the S&P 500 Index
price without rummaging through the website!
Going Further (Advanced uses)
Multiple Indices
So scraping one index is not enough for you, right? We can try to extract multiple
indices at the same time.
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First, modify the quote_page into an array of URLs.
quote_page = [‘http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SPX:IND',
‘http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/CCMP:IND']
Then we change the data extraction code into a for loop, which will process the URLs
one by one and store all the data into a variable data in tuples.
# for loop
data = []
for pg in quote_page:
# query the website and return the html to the variable ‘page’
page = urllib2.urlopen(pg)
# parse the html using beautiful soap and store in variable `soup`
soup = BeautifulSoup(page, ‘html.parser’)
# Take out the <div> of name and get its value
name_box = soup.find(‘h1’, attrs={‘class’: ‘name’})
name = name_box.text.strip() # strip() is used to remove starting
and trailing
# get the index price
price_box = soup.find(‘div’, attrs={‘class’:’price’})
price = price_box.text
# save the data in tuple
data.append((name, price))
Also, modify the saving section to save data row by row.
# open a csv file with append, so old data will not be erased
with open(‘index.csv’, ‘a’) as csv_file:
writer = csv.writer(csv_file)
# The for loop
for name, price in data:
writer.writerow([name, price, datetime.now()])
Rerun the program and you should be able to extract two indices at the same time!
Advanced Scraping Techniques
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BeautifulSoup is simple and great for small-scale web scraping. But if you are
interested in scraping data at a larger scale, you should consider using these other
alternatives:
1. Scrapy, a powerful python scraping framework
2. Try to integrate your code with some public APIs. The efficiency of data retrieval is
much higher than scraping webpages. For example, take a look at Facebook Graph
API, which can help you get hidden data which is not shown on Facebook
webpages.
3. Consider using a database backend like MySQL to store your data when it gets too
large.
Adopt the DRY Method
DRY stands for “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, try to automate your everyday tasks like this
person. Some other fun projects to consider might be keeping track of your Facebook
friends’ active time (with their consent of course), or grabbing a list of topics in a forum
and trying out natural language processing (which is a hot topic for Artificial
Intelligence right now)!
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If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below.
References
http://www.gregreda.com/2013/03/03/web-scraping-101-with-python/
http://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2015/10/beginner-guide-web-scraping-
beautiful-soup-python/
This article was originally published on Altitude Labs’ blog and was written by our
software engineer, Leonard Mok. Altitude Labs is a software agency that specializes in
personalized, mobile-first React apps.
Web Development Software Development Python Programming Life Hacking
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