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WebScraping Lessons 1

Web Parsing Course: Lesson 1 - Introduction to Web Parsing

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23 views

WebScraping Lessons 1

Web Parsing Course: Lesson 1 - Introduction to Web Parsing

Uploaded by

jofil39669
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Web Parsing Course: Lesson 1 - Introduction to Web Parsing

Objective:

In this first lesson, we will introduce web parsing, its use cases, and the tools available for
collecting and processing data from websites. You will gain an understanding of how web data can
be transformed into structured information for applications such as research, business intelligence,
and machine learning.

Lesson Outline:

1. What is Web Parsing?


o Web parsing (or web scraping) refers to the process of automatically extracting
information from websites. Instead of manually copying data, a parser reads the
HTML content of the site and extracts relevant pieces of data (like text, images, or
links).
o Why parse data?
 Automating data collection from sources that don't provide an API.
 Collecting information for analysis, reporting, or feeding into machine
learning models.
2. Legal and Ethical Considerations
o Understanding the difference between public web scraping and private or restricted
content.
o Robots.txt: The file that defines what web crawlers are allowed to access.
o Respecting site usage policies and terms of service.
3. Web Scraping vs Web Crawling
o Web Scraping: Collecting specific data from a page or set of pages.
o Web Crawling: Navigating through a website by following links to gather data from
multiple pages.
o Example: Scraping a list of real estate properties vs. crawling multiple listing
websites.
4. Overview of Web Technologies
o HTML: The structure of a webpage that defines how content is displayed.
o CSS: Styling for elements (not necessary for parsing but useful to understand how
pages are visually structured).
o JavaScript: Can dynamically change content on a webpage, which is crucial for
understanding how to scrape dynamic sites.
o APIs: Some websites offer structured data through APIs (JSON/XML). If an API is
available, it should be used instead of scraping.
5. Common Libraries and Tools for Web Parsing
o BeautifulSoup (Python): A library for parsing HTML and XML documents. Allows
easy navigation and searching of parsed elements.
o lxml (Python): Fast, feature-rich library for XML and HTML parsing.
o Selenium: A web automation tool used to scrape websites that rely heavily on
JavaScript.
o Playwright: Modern automation framework for more advanced scraping, especially
when dealing with dynamic or interactive content.
o Scrapy: A powerful web crawling framework designed for large-scale scraping
projects.
o Overview of other languages (Node.js, Ruby, PHP) and tools available for web
parsing.
6. Setting up the Environment
o Installing Python: Walkthrough of Python installation if not already done.
o Installing BeautifulSoup and Requests:

bash
Копіювати код
pip install beautifulsoup4 requests

o Basic Project Setup:


 Create a folder for your project.
 Set up a virtual environment for package management.
7. Basic Web Request
o Understanding HTTP: Requests, responses, and status codes.
o How to make a simple GET request to fetch the HTML of a webpage using
requests library:

python
Копіювати код
import requests
response = requests.get('https://example.com')
print(response.text)

o Introduction to status codes (e.g., 200 OK, 404 Not Found, 403 Forbidden).
8. Extracting Data with BeautifulSoup
o Parsing the HTML from a request:

python
Копіювати код
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
print(soup.prettify())

o Basic navigation in the HTML tree: Tags, Attributes, Text.


o Example: Extracting all links from a page:

python
Копіювати код
for link in soup.find_all('a'):
print(link.get('href'))

9. Your First Parsing Task


o Practical assignment:
 Visit any public website.
 Use requests to fetch the HTML.
 Extract all the links or headers (h1, h2, h3, etc.) from the page using
BeautifulSoup.
10. Homework

 Set up a Python environment.


 Install requests and BeautifulSoup.
 Write a small script that parses a simple webpage of your choice and extracts useful
information (e.g., titles, links, paragraphs).

Key Takeaways:

 Understanding the difference between scraping and crawling.


 Setting up the environment and basic tools for web scraping.
 Performing a simple web scraping operation using Python's requests and BeautifulSoup.

By the end of this lesson, you will have a working environment and a fundamental understanding of
how to retrieve and parse HTML content. This foundation will be crucial as we move forward to
more advanced topics like handling dynamic content and large-scale scraping in future lessons.

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