Imagine collecting all the required information from a website with just a few lines of Python codes! Yes, it’s possible by using Python libraries such as Beautiful Soup and Requests.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is a technique to automate the extraction process of a large amount of data from the website. The data present on the websites will be in unstructured format but with the help of Web scraping, you can scrape, access, and store the data in a much more structured and clean format for your further analysis.
How to perform Web scraping in Python? Web scraping can be performed only on the websites which provide permissions before scraping, please check the policies of the website.
Steps to Scrape Flipkart Data using Python:
1.Install the necessary libraries like Beautiful Soup and Requests
2.Choose the data you need to extract
3.Send HTTP request to the URL of the page you want to scrape
4.Inspect the page and write codes for extraction
Beautiful Soup Library is one of the easiest libraries that can be used for web scraping and is beginner-friendly but it comes with its own cons. Some of them are:
it is not the best for scraping dynamic content i.e for the content which keeps on changing. it is dependent on other libraries for sending requests to a webpage. it does not perform the best with big web scraping projects and is a little slow compared to another library such as scrapy.