web scraper in python

Web scraping refers to the process of extracting data from websites. In Python, we can use several libraries to implement web scrapers. One of the most popular libraries for web scraping in Python is BeautifulSoup.

To get started with web scraping in Python, you need to first install the requests and BeautifulSoup libraries. You can do this using pip by running the following command in your terminal:

main.py
pip install requests BeautifulSoup4
36 chars
2 lines

Next, you can write a simple Python script to scrape data from a webpage. Here is an example that scrapes the title and the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article:

main.py
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# Request the webpage
url = 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping'
response = requests.get(url)

# Parse the HTML content using BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser')

# Extract the title and the first paragraph
title = soup.title.string
paragraph = soup.find('div', {'class': 'mw-parser-output'}).p.text

# Print the results
print('Title:', title)
print('Paragraph:', paragraph)
462 chars
18 lines

In the code above, we first use the requests library to send a request to the webpage and retrieve its HTML content. We then use BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML content and extract the title and the first paragraph of the article. Finally, we print the results.

Note that web scraping may not be legal in all cases and can also put a lot of load on the target website, so it's important to use web scraping responsibly and with permission when necessary.