Web Scraping means collecting data from a web page. It is one of the techniques used by Data Science professionals to create datasets. Python has a collection of useful libraries for web scraping. If you want to know about those libraries, this article is for you. This article will take you through some of the best Python libraries for web scraping.
Best Python Libraries for Web Scraping
Below are some of the best Python libraries for web scraping that you should know.
Requests
Requests is easy to use and understand Python library for web scraping. It is already available on the Python standard library, so you don’t need to install anything for using it. Some of the features that the Requests library in Python provides for web scraping are:
- can collect data from International domains and URLs
- Automatic Content Decoding
- HTTP(S) Proxy Support
- Multipart File Uploads
- Streaming Downloads
- and many more
You can learn more about using the Requests library in Python for web scraping from here.
Beautiful Soup
Beautiful Soup is a Python library used for collecting data from HTML and XML formats. What happens is that when we collect data from a web page, it is unstructured and only available in HTML and XML formats. To create a dataset by collecting data from a web page, you should prefer Beautiful Soup over other Python libraries.
You can learn more about using Beautiful Soup for web scraping using Python from here.
Summary
So these were some of the best Python libraries for collecting data from the web that you should know. Web Scraping means collecting data from a web page. It is one of the techniques used by Data Science professionals to create datasets. I hope you liked this article on the best Python libraries for collecting data from the web. Feel free to ask valuable questions in the comments section below.
