Web Scraping Process
Web scraping is about extracting data from websites by parsing its HTML. On some sites, data is available easily to download in CSV or JSON format, but in some cases that’s not possible for that, we need web scraping.
Our Web Scraping Process
Check out our video to learn more about scraping websites like Yelp!
How Is Web Scraping Done?
We can do web scraping with Python.
Scrapy
Scrapy is a fast high-level web crawling and web scraping framework used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It can be used for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing. It is developed & maintained by Scrapinghub and many other contributors.
Scrapy is best out of the two because in it we have to focus mostly on parsing the webpage HTML structure and not on sending requests and getting HTML content from the response, in Scrapy that part is done by Scrapy we have to only mention the website URL.
A Scrapy project can also be hosted on Scrapinghub, we can set a schedule for when to run a scraper.
Beautiful Soup
To scrape a website with Beautiful Soup we also need to use requests library to send requests to the website and get the response and then get HTML content from that response and pass it to the Beautiful Soup object for parsing.
Selenium
Selenium Python bindings provide a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. Through Selenium Python API you can access all functionalities of Selenium WebDriver in an intuitive way.
Selenium is used to scrape websites that load content dynamically like Facebook, Twitter, etc. or if we have to perform a click or scroll page action to log in or signup to get to the page that has to be scrapped.
Selenium can be used with Scrapy and Beautiful Soup after the site has loaded the dynamically generated content we can get access to the HTML of that site through selenium and pass it to Scrapy or beautiful soup and perform the same operations.
Meet Our Tech expert
Sandeep Natoo
Sandeep is a highly experienced Python Developer with 15+ years of work experience in developing heterogeneous systems in the IT sector. He is an expert in building integrated web applications using Java and Python. With a background in data analytics. Sandeep has a knack for translating complex datasets into meaningful insights, and his passion lies in interpreting the data and providing a valuable prediction with a good eye for detail.
Get Free ConsultationStep-By-Step Data Scraping Example
Step 1 => Since we are only fetching restaurant reviews in San Francisco, the scraping URL will redirect us to the page below.
Step 2 => We will now create a Scrapy project with the command below
Scrapy startproject restaurant_reviews Scrapy project structure
Check Out What It Takes To Build A Successful App Here
Step 3 => Now we will create 2 items(Restaurant and Review) in items.py to store and output the extracted data in a structured format.
Step 4 => Now we will create a custom pipeline, in Scrapy to output data in 2 separate CSV files(Restaurants.csv & Reviews.csv). After creating the custom pipeline we will add it in ITEM_PIPELINES of Scrapy settings.py file.
settings.py
Connecting Emerging And Established designers With Manufacturers Using Data Scraping
Output
1. Restaurants.csv
Here we can see all the restaurants fetched.
2. Reviews.csv
Here we can see the reviews with their restaurant references.
Why Mindbowser For Web Scraping?
When you appoint data scraping experts from Mindbowser, we dedicatedly provide end-to-end support to accomplish your organizational objectives quickly.
Conclusion
The above example shows us the web scraping process and how with the help of some tools, we can extract information from a website for a number of purposes. It only shows a basic use case of Scrapy, it can do a lot more.
We can do a lot of things with the output of the above example like:
- Topic Modelling: It can help us get in-depth information about the topics the review is about.
- Sentiment Analysis: It can help us get sentiments of each review for more in-depth analysis.
We can also extract reviews from other review sites.
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