This python module was created by Leonard Richardson.
A large definition can be this:
Web Scraping (also termed Screen Scraping, Web Data Extraction, Web Harvesting, etc.) is a technique employed to extract large amounts of data from websites whereby the data is extracted and saved to a local file in your computer or to a database in table (spreadsheet) format.
This python module can do that but the input format and output format is different.
The input can be a webpage like an URL or webpage with all pieces of information and the output depends by the this and the user choices.
Les's see some examples:
First example show you how to take content of the first row table from a wikipedia webpage.
# get table from wikipedia
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
website_url = requests.get('https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Table_of_food_nutrients').text
soup = BeautifulSoup(website_url,'lxml')
my_table = soup.find('table',{'class':'wikitable collapsible collapsed'})
links = my_table.findAll('a')
Food = []
for link in links:
Food.append(link.get('title'))
print(Food)
# get links using the url
import urllib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
page = urllib.request.urlopen('http://____share.net/filmes/').read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
soup.prettify()
for anchor in soup.findAll('a', href=True):
print (anchor['href'])# get images from imgur search query
import urllib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = 'https://imgur.com/search/score?q=cyborg'
with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as f:
soup = BeautifulSoup(f.read(),'lxml')
a_tags = soup.findAll("a",{"class":"image-list-link"})
img_tags = [a.find("img") for a in a_tags]
print(img_tags)
srcs = []
for s in img_tags:
src_tags=('http:'+s['src'])
srcs.append(src_tags)
print(srcs)It will greatly help your Chrome F12 key to access parts of web content.