🕸️ Introduction to Web Scraping with Python

Have you ever wished you could grab data from a website automatically — like prices from an e-commerce site, quotes from your favorite author, or the latest headlines? That’s where web scraping comes in.

In this post, we’ll cover:

✅ What web scraping is
✅ The tools you need
✅ A simple project: scraping quotes from a website
✅ Best practices and legal tips

🤔 What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites using code. Instead of copying and pasting manually, you write a script that automates the task.

🧰 Tools of the Trade

Here are the most popular Python libraries for web scraping:

requests – for fetching web pages
BeautifulSoup – for parsing HTML
pandas – for organizing and saving scraped data
lxml or selenium – for advanced scraping (JS-heavy pages)

Install Required Packages

pip install requests beautifulsoup4 pandas

🧪 Your First Web Scraper

Let’s scrape data from http://quotes.toscrape.com — a beginner-friendly site made for practicing scraping.

Step 1: Import Libraries

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import pandas as pd

Step 2: Fetch and Parse the Page

url = "http://quotes.toscrape.com"
response = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")

Step 3: Extract the Data

quotes = []
authors = []

for quote_block in soup.find_all("div", class_="quote"):
    quote = quote_block.find("span", class_="text").text
    author = quote_block.find("small", class_="author").text
    quotes.append(quote)
    authors.append(author)

Step 4: Save to a DataFrame or CSV

df = pd.DataFrame({
    "Quote": quotes,
    "Author": authors
})

df.to_csv("quotes.csv", index=False)
print(df.head())

📌 Output Example

Quote	Author
“The world as we have created it…”	Albert Einstein
“It is our choices…”	J.K. Rowling

⚠️ Best Practices & Legal Notes

✅ Check robots.txt: Visit https://example.com/robots.txt to see what’s allowed.
✅ Be gentle: Avoid overloading servers — add delays between requests.
❌ Don’t scrape login-protected or paid content.
✅ Respect site terms of service.

import time
time.sleep(1)  # Be respectful to the server

🔄 Going Further

Want to scrape:

Pagination (multiple pages)?
Product details from Amazon (⚠️ tricky)?
Dynamic websites with JavaScript? (use selenium or playwright)

Let me know, and I’ll show you how!

✅ Recap

Web scraping lets you:

Automate data collection
Build datasets from public info
Integrate real-time content into your projects

Python + BeautifulSoup is a powerful, beginner-friendly combo to get started.

Search This Blog