As the internet grows, so does the need for web scraping. More and more companies are turning to web scraping to get the data they need to make informed decisions. But what is web scraping? And how can you do it?
Web scraping is the process of extracting data from a website. It can be used to get contact information, prices, product descriptions, or just about anything else that is on a website.
There are two main ways to scrape a website: through an API or by parsing the HTML. APIs are easier to use but may not be available for all websites. If you’re looking to scrape a website that doesn’t have an API, you’ll need to parse the HTML.
HTML is made up of elements. Each element has a start tag and an end tag. The content of the element is between these tags. For example, here is a paragraph element:
This is a paragraph.
To scrape data from an HTML element, you need to first find the start tag and then find the end tag. The content between these tags is the data you’re looking for. To find an element’s start tag, look for the opening angle bracket (<). To find an element's end tag, look for the closing angle bracket (>).
Once you’ve found an element’s start and end tags, you can extract the data between them. This data is often in the form of text, but it can also be in the form of images or other media.
When scraping data from a website, it’s important to be respectful of the site’s Terms of Service (ToS). You should only scrape data that you have permission to scrape. Additionally, you should make sure not to overload the website with requests or you may get banned.
