🎯 Learning Objectives
By the end of this level, you will be able to: - Understand what web scraping is and when to use it - Make HTTP requests to fetch web pages - Parse HTML content using BeautifulSoup - Extract specific data from web pages - Handle basic errors
📖 Concepts Covered
1. What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites automatically. Instead of manually copying information, we write programs to do it for us.
2. HTTP Requests
When you visit a website, your browser sends an HTTP request to the server. We can do the same with Python using the requests library.
3. HTML Parsing
HTML is the structure of web pages. We use parsers like BeautifulSoup to navigate and extract data from HTML.
📝 Examples
Example 1: Basic Scraping
Learn how to fetch a web page and see its HTML content.
Example 2: Extract Links
Extract all links from a webpage.
Example 3: Extract Text
Extract and clean text content from web pages.
Example 4: Selenium Introduction
Introduction to Selenium for browser automation and JavaScript-heavy sites.
Example 5: Selenium Interactions
Basic interactions with Selenium: clicking, filling forms, keyboard actions.
🛠️ Tools You'll Use
- requests: For making HTTP requests
- BeautifulSoup: For parsing HTML
- lxml: HTML parser (faster than default)
⚠️ Common Mistakes
- Forgetting to check if request succeeded: Always check
response.status_code - Not handling missing elements: Use try-except or check if element exists
- Scraping too fast: Add delays between requests (we'll cover this in intermediate)
🎓 Exercises
After completing the examples, try: 1. Scrape the title and all paragraph text from a news article 2. Extract all image URLs from a webpage 3. Get the price and name of products from an e-commerce page
📚 Next Steps
Once you're comfortable with these basics, move on to the Intermediate level where you'll learn about pagination, forms, and more complex scraping scenarios.