APIs are not always available. Sometimes you have to scrape data from a webpage yourself. Luckily the modules Pandas and Beautifulsoup can help!
Related Course:Complete Python Programming Course & Exercises
Then beautifulsoup4 module is used to scrape data from websites. Now, Let’s begin our tutorial about web scraping with beautifulsoup 4: Web Scraping With BS4: Let me tell you that what data from which website we’re going to scrap today. Basically, we’re going to perform our web scraping on StackOverflow. To do this, we’ll first scrape data for over 2000 movies. It’s essential to identify the goal of our scraping right from the beginning. Writing a scraping script can take a lot of time, especially if we want to scrape more than one web page. We want to avoid spending hours writing a script which scrapes data we won’t actually need.
Web scraping
Pandas has a neat concept known as a DataFrame. A DataFrame can hold data and be easily manipulated. We can combine Pandas with Beautifulsoup to quickly get data from a webpage.
If you find a table on the web like this:
We can convert it to JSON with:
And in a browser get the beautiful json output:
Scrape Website With Beautifulsoup
Converting to lists
Beautiful Soup Basics
Rows can be converted to Python lists.
We can convert it to a dataframe using just a few lines:
Python Bs4 Web Scraping
Pretty print pandas dataframe
Web Scraping With Python Beautifulsoup
You can convert it to an ascii table with the module tabulate.
This code will instantly convert the table on the web to an ascii table:
This will show in the terminal as: