If these tags are new to you, it might be worth taking some time quickly getting up to speed with HTML. These attributes can help with styling by uniquely identifying elements. HTML tags can also be given attributes, like the id and class attributes in the example above. The tags wrap around the visible part of a website, which is made up by various combinations of header tags ( to ), paragraphs ( ), links ( ) and several others not shown in this example, such as and tags. HTML will always start with a type declaration of and will be contained between / tags. Example Heading Example paragraph Example link The following is a simple example of a HTML page:
#WEBSCRAPER NOT SELECTING LINKS HOW TO#
So let's get started! HTML basicsīefore we get into the web scraping, it's important to understand how HTML is structured so we can appreciate how to extract data from it. Using Beautiful Soup we can easily select any links, tables, lists or whatever else we require from a page with the libraries powerful built-in methods. If you'd like to know a bit more about the Requests library and how it works, check out this post for a bit more depth. We can use the Requests library to retrieve the web page containing our data, and we can use the awesome Beautiful Soup package for parsing and extracting the data. Python provides two very powerful tools for doing both of these tasks. Parse the HTML string to find the bits you care about.There are two basic steps to web scraping for getting the data you want: Web Scraping with Python and Beautiful Soup Web pages are built using HTML to create structured documents, and these documents can be parsed using programming languages to gather the data you want. If you wanted to build an app that told people the current weather in their area, you could find a weather API and use the data from the API to give users the latest forecast.īut what do you do when the website you want to use doesn't have an API? That's where Web Scraping comes in. Nowadays, there are APIs for nearly everything. Requests Python Web Scraping BeautifulSoupġ2 minute read 2 comments 4 likes 17025 views