Python Web Scraper (Very Simple Example)

Welcome to a tutorial on how to create a simple web scraper in Python. So you need to fetch some data from another webpage in Python?

That should cover the basics, but just how does it work exactly? Read on for the example!

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

EXAMPLE CODE DOWNLOAD

Source code on GitHub Gist

Just click on “download zip” or do a git clone. I have released it under the MIT license, so feel free to build on top of it or use it in your own project.

 

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QUICK SETUP

• Create a virtual environment virtualenv venv and activate it – venv\Scripts\activate (Windows) venv/bin/activate (Linux/Mac)
• Install required libraries – pip install flask requests beautifulsoup4
• For those who are new, the default Flask folders are –
  • static Public files (JS/CSS/images/videos/audio)
  • templates HTML pages

 

 

STEP 1) DUMMY PRODUCT PAGE

<div id="product">
  <img src="static/sandwich.png" id="pImg">
  <div id="pName">Sandwich</div>
  <div id="pPrice">$12.34</div>
  <div id="pDesc">Just a regular SAND wich.</div>
  <input type="button" value="Add To Cart" id="pAdd">
</div>

First, we need a web page to work with. Here’s a simple dummy product page, we will use the web scraper to extract the product information from this page.

 

 

STEP 2) PYTHON WEB SCRAPER

# (A) LOAD REQUIRED MODULES
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
 
# (B) GET HTML
html = requests.get("http://localhost").text
# print(html)
 
# (C) HTML PARSER
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
name = soup.find("div", {"id": "pName"}).text
desc = soup.find("div", {"id": "pDesc"}).text
price = soup.find("div", {"id": "pPrice"}).text
image = soup.find("img", {"id": "pImg"})["src"]
print(name)
print(desc)
print(price)
print(image)

(venv) D:\HTTP>py S2_scrape.py
Sandwich
Just a regular SAND wich.
$12.34
static/sandwich.png

Yep. That is pretty much all it takes to scrape a website in Python.

1. Load the required modules.
2. Use requests.get(URL).text to get the web page as text.
3. We can pretty much do “hardcore string searches”, or use regular expressions to extract information from the “HTML string”. But the smarter way is to use an HTML parser, which will make data extraction a lot easier.

P.S. The text and image source is not the only information that can be extracted. Follow up with the BeautifulSoup documentation if you need more, links are below.

 

 

LINKS & REFERENCES

• BeautifulSoup Documentation
• Python Requests