Guide to Parsing HTML with BeautifulSoup in Python
Introduction
Web scraping is programmatically collecting information from various websites. While there are many libraries and frameworks in various languages that can extract web data, Python has long been a popular choice because of its plethora of options for web scraping.
This article will give you a crash course on web scraping in Python with Beautiful Soup – a popular Python library for parsing HTML and XML.
Ethical Web Scraping
Web scraping is ubiquitous and gives us data as we would get with an API. However, as good citizens of the internet, it’s our responsibility to respect the site owners we scrape from. Here are some principles that a web scraper should adhere to:
- Don’t claim scraped content as our own. Website owners sometimes spend a lengthy amount of time creating articles, collecting details about products or harvesting other content. We must respect their labor and originality.