Web scraping means extracting data from the Internet through which we can instantly access data from any publicly accessible web page. There are so many Python libraries that automate the web scraping process. In this article, I’ll introduce you to the best Python libraries for web scraping.
Python Libraries for Web Scraping
Python is such a popular programming language today in the coding community. The library support we get in Python is one of the main reasons for Python’s popularity. For each task, we have more than one library in Python. Below are the best Python libraries for web scraping that you will learn in this article:
- Scrapy
- Selenium
- BeautifulSoup
- Urllib.request
You must have heard of these Python libraries before, but if you don’t know anything about how to use these libraries for web scraping, let’s go through all of these libraries one by one.
Scrapy
You can easily install this library by using the pip command; pip install scrapy. To use this library you have to first set up a new scrapy project which means to create a new directory where you can to run the code. For scarping the web using Scrapy, we need to have a spider that defines the certainty of how well the web page will be scrapped. Here is how you can use Scrapy for web scraping using Python:
You can learn more about this library for web scraping from here.
Selenium
Some websites don’t allow anyone to scrape data from them so in this case, you have to simulate the complete process of working with a browser. For this task, the Selenium library in Python is used. You can easily install this library by using the pip command; pip install selenium. Here is how you can use this library for web scraping with Python:
You can learn more about this library for web scraping from here.
BeautifulSoup
BeautifulSoup is a great Python library that can be used to get data in a tabular format from any website. Most of the data you work with is created by using this library. So if you want to scrape data from a web page by using Python and create a dataset by using the scraped data then you can use the BeautufulSoup library in Python. Here is how you can use this library for web scraping using Python:
You can learn more about this library for web scraping from here.
Urllib.request
The urllib.request library is the standard Python library that can be used to download any content from any web page. It is basically used to open any URL and collecting data from that URL. Here is how you can use this library for web scraping:
You can learn more about this Python library for web scraping from here.
So these were the best Python libraries for web scraping. I hope you liked this article on the best Python libraries for web scraping. Feel free to ask your valuable questions in the comments section below.
