I don’t think simply downloading publicly and freely available data from a website in an efficient manner should be considered illegal, but once again, it’s a grey area. Even if somewhat ironically the whole modern tech economy is built on one giant web scraper, Google.
It’s a grey and controversial area, many websites do not like it and they defend against web scraping. Precautionsīefore we start, I think it’s important to emphasise the dangers one faces during web scraping.
#Useful commands for python webscraper how to#
After that, we will discuss how to deploy a scraper in a “real-life” situation, and see where it leads us. Then, we will have a look at the core functionalities that we will use later in Wikipedia. First, we are going to talk about precautions one has to take when starting web scraping, which is a topic that I think is quite often simply ignored in guides. In this blogpost, I will share my very personal story of using selenium for web scraping for the first time.
#Useful commands for python webscraper plus#
Plus I also just wanted to have fun with using a web browser via code. I did not want to download massive data, but I did want to navigate a deliberately confusingly built website to get to the information I needed. Yet, despite all this, selenium seemed perfect for my purposes. Working with selenium is also relatively slow, because you are essentially using a browser in the background. I found too many guides that forget to mention this piece of information. The core disadvantage is that selenium is not a web scraping tool per se, it was designed for automated testing. The great advantage is that it makes you able to navigate the web with ease, with only minimal necessary HTML knowledge. But what happens if you want to scrape the contents of a website that is protective about their data?Ī quick (maybe too quick) search led me to selenium, another package that’s available in Python. In other words, it’s great as long as the website owner actually does not mind sharing the information with you. However, I soon started to realise that BeautifulSoup is only great as long as you have static tables, pages where you can easily figure out the URL structure, and there are no JavaScripts running that load new data on the same page. I highly enjoy building automated processes, so when I first gathered data this way using BeautifulSoup, it was an oddly satisfying experience. The concept of web scraping was immediately alluring to me the first time I heard about it.
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