Web scraping is a powerful tool for extracting data from websites automatically.
Web scraping involves extracting data from websites using automated processes.
Legal considerations for web scraping include checking robots.txt files, reading Terms of Service, and avoiding overloading servers.
Popular Python libraries for web scraping include requests, BeautifulSoup, pandas, lxml, Selenium, and playwright.
A step-by-step example of web scraping involves sending requests, parsing HTML, extracting quotes and authors, and storing data using pandas.
Scraping multiple pages can involve iterating over pages and storing data in a structured format.
Bonus: Scraping JavaScript-rendered sites using Selenium may require installing Selenium, WebDriver, and utilizing appropriate drivers.
Best practices for web scraping include using headers, adding delays, handling exceptions, respecting terms of use, and using proxies for large-scale scraping.
Real-world use cases for web scraping include news monitoring, e-commerce price tracking, competitor research, NLP/ML projects, job listings, and market analysis.
Web scraping is a foundational tool for data scientists with endless possibilities for custom datasets and AI model empowerment.