Content from Hello-Scraping

Last updated on 2025-06-10 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • What’s behind a website, and how can I extract information from it?
  • What ethical and legal considerations should I keep in mind before scraping a website?

Objectives

  • Identify the structure and key components of an HTML document.
  • Use BeautifulSoup to locate elements, tags, attributes, and text within an HTML page.
  • Recognize situations where web scraping is inappropriate or not permitted for accessing data.

Introduction

This workshop is a continuation of our Introduction to Web Scraping workshop. If you’re looking for a gentler introduction that uses XPath and the Scraper Chrome extension, take a look at the workshop materials for that workshop.

Here, we’ll revisit some of those core ideas to build a more hands-on understanding of how content and data are structured on the web. We’ll start by exploring what HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is and how it uses tags to organize and format content. Then, we’ll introduce the BeautifulSoup library to parse HTML and make it easier to search for and extract specific elements from a webpage.

We’ll begin with simple examples and gradually move on to scraping more complex, real-world websites.

HTML quick overview

All websites have a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) document behind them. Below is an example of HTML for a very simple webpage that contains just three sentences. As you look through it, try to imagine how the website would appear in a browser.

HTML 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Sample web page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>h1 Header #1</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph tag</p>
<h2>h2 Sub-header</h2>
<p>A new paragraph, now in the <b>sub-header</b></p>
<h1>h1 Header #2</h1>
<p>
This other paragraph has two hyperlinks,
one to <a href="https://carpentries.org/">The Carpentries homepage</a>,
and another to the
<a href="https://carpentries.org/workshops/past-workshops/">past workshops</a> page.
</p>
</body>
</html>

If you save that text in a file with a .html extension —using a simple text editor like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on macOS— and open it in your web browser, the browser will interpret the markup language and display a nicely formatted web page.

Screenshot of a simple website with the previews HTML

When you open an HTML file in your browser, what it’s really doing is reading a structured document made up of elements, each marked by tags inside angle brackets (< and >). For instance, the HTML root element, which delimits the beginning and end of an HTML document, is identified by the <html> tag.

Most elements have both an opening tag and a closing tag, which define the start and end of that element. For example, in the simple website we looked at earlier, the head element begins with <head> and ends with </head>.

Because elements can be nested inside one another, an HTML document forms a tree structure, where each element is a node that can contain child nodes, as illustrated in the image below.

Screenshot of a simple website with the previews HTML
The Document Object Model (DOM) that represents an HTML document with a tree structure. Source: Wikipedia. Author: Birger Eriksson

Finally, we can define or modify the behavior, appearance, or functionality of an element using attributes. Attributes appear inside the opening tag and consist of a name and a value, formatted like name="value".

For example, in the simple website, we added a hyperlink using the <a>...</a> tags. To specify the destination URL, we used the href attribute inside the opening <a> tag like this: <a href="https://carpentries.org/workshops/past-workshops/">past workshops</a>.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of common HTML elements and their purposes:

  • <hmtl>...</html>: The root element that contains the entire document.
  • <head>...</head>: Contains metadata such as the page title that the browser displays.
  • <body>...</body>: Contains the content that will be shown on the webpage.
  • <h1>...</h1>, <h2>...</h2>, <h3>...</h3>: Define headers of levels 1, 2, 3, and so on.
  • <p>...</p>: Represents a paragraph.
  • <a href="">...</a>: Creates a hyperlink; the destination URL is set with the href attribute.
  • <img src="" alt="">: Embeds an image, with the image source specified by src and alternative text provided by alt. It doesn’t have an opening tag.
  • <table>...</table>, <th>...</th>, <tr>...</tr>, <td>...</td>: Define a table structure, with headers (<th>), rows (<tr>), and cells (<td>).
  • <div>...</div>: Groups sections of HTML content together.
  • <script>...</script>: Embeds or links to JavaScript code.

In the list above, we mentioned some attributes specific to hyperlink (<a>) and image (<img>) elements, but there are also several global attributes that most HTML elements can have. These are especially useful for identifying elements when web scraping:

  • id="": Assigns a unique identifier to an element; this ID must be unique within the entire HTML document.
  • title="": Provides extra information about the element, shown as a tooltip when the user hovers over it.
  • class="": Applies a common styling or grouping to multiple elements at once.

To summarize: elements are identified by tags, and attributes let us assign properties or identifiers to those elements. Understanding this structure will make it much easier to extract specific data from a website.

Parsing HTML with BeautifulSoup

Now that we understand how a website is structured, we can begin extracting information from it. The BeautifulSoup package is our main tool for this task —it parses the HTML so we can programmatically search for and access the elements we need.

To see how BeautifulSoup works, we’ll use the simple website example from earlier. As a first step, we’ll load the BeautifulSoup package along with Pandas.

PYTHON 

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import pandas as pd

Let’s store the HTML content in a string variable named example_html.

PYTHON 

example_html = """
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Sample web page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>h1 Header #1</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph tag</p>
<h2>h2 Sub-header</h2>
<p>A new paragraph, now in the <b>sub-header</b></p>
<h1>h1 Header #2</h1>
<p>
This other paragraph has two hyperlinks,
one to <a href="https://carpentries.org/">The Carpentries homepage</a>,
and another to the
<a href="https://carpentries.org/workshops/past-workshops/">past workshops</a> page.
</p>
</body>
</html>
"""

We parse the HTML by passing it to the BeautifulSoup() function, specifying html.parser as the parser. This creates an object that represents the document as a nested data structure —similar to the tree structure we discussed earlier. Using the .prettify() method on this object displays the HTML with indentation that reflects its nested structure, making it easier to read.

PYTHON 

soup = BeautifulSoup(example_html, 'html.parser')
print(soup.prettify())

OUTPUT 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
 <head>
  <title>
   Sample web page
  </title>
 </head>
 <body>
  <h1>
   h1 Header #1
  </h1>
  <p>
   This is a paragraph tag
  </p>
  <h2>
   h2 Sub-header
  </h2>
  <p>
   A new paragraph, now in the
   <b>
    sub-header
   </b>
  </p>
  <h1>
   h1 Header #2
  </h1>
  <p>
   This other paragraph has two  hyperlinks, one to
   <a href="https://carpentries.org/">
    The Carpentries homepage
   </a>
   , and another to the
   <a href="https://carpentries.org/workshops/past-workshops/">
    past workshops
   </a>
   .
  </p>
 </body>
</html>

Now that our soup variable holds the parsed document, we can use the .find() and .find_all() methods to search for elements.

  • .find() looks for the first occurrence of a specified tag and returns the entire element, including its opening and closing tags.

  • If multiple elements share the same tag, .find() returns only the first one.

  • To get all matching elements, use .find_all(), which returns a list of all elements with the specified tag.

  • To extract just the text inside an element and all its children, use the .get_text() method. .find() will search the tag that we specify, and return the entire element, including the starting and closing tags.

Below, you’ll see examples of how these commands work with our simple website.

PYTHON 

print("1.", soup.find('title'))
print("2.", soup.find('title').get_text())
print("3.", soup.find('h1').get_text())
print("4.", soup.find_all('h1'))
print("5.", soup.find_all('a'))
print("6.", soup.get_text())

OUTPUT 

1. <title>Sample web page</title>
2. Sample web page
3. h1 Header #1
4. [<h1>h1 Header #1</h1>, <h1>h1 Header #2</h1>]
5. [<a href="https://carpentries.org/">The Carpentries homepage</a>, <a href="https://carpentries.org/workshops/past-workshops/">past workshops</a>]
6.

Sample web page


h1 Header #1
This is a paragraph tag
h2 Sub-header
A new paragraph, now in the sub-header
h1 Header #2

This other paragraph has two hyperlinks,
one to The Carpentries homepage,
and another to the
past workshops page.

How would you extract all hyperlinks identified with <a> tags? In our example, we see that there are only two hyperlinks, and we could extract them in a list using the .find_all('a') method.

PYTHON 

links = soup.find_all('a')
print("Number of hyperlinks found: ", len(links))
print(links)

OUTPUT 

Number of hyperlinks found:  2
[<a href="https://carpentries.org/">The Carpentries homepage</a>, <a href="https://carpentries.org/workshops/past-workshops/">past workshops</a>]

To access the value of a given attribute in an element, for example the value of the href attribute in <a href="">, we would use the .get() method with the name of the attribute (i.e. .get('href')). Let’s make a loop that prints only the URL for each hyperlink we have in our example.

PYTHON 

for item in links:
    print(item.get('href'))

OUTPUT 

https://carpentries.org/
https://carpentries.org/workshops/past-workshops/

Challenge

Create a Python dictionary that has the following three items, containing information about the first hyperlink in the HTML of our example.

PYTHON 

first_link = {
   'element': the complete hyperlink element,
   'url': the destination url of the hyperlink,
   'text': the text that the website displays as the hyperlink
}

One way of completing the exercise is as follows.

PYTHON 

first_link = {
   'element': str(soup.find('a')),
   'url': soup.find('a').get('href'),
   'text': soup.find('a').get_text()
}

An alternative and often more efficient approach is to first store the result of soup.find('a') in a variable, rather than calling it multiple times. This makes your code cleaner and avoids redundant searches.

You can also start by creating an empty dictionary and then add key-value pairs to it. This is especially useful when you’re extracting multiple pieces of information in a loop, as you’ll likely want to build up a dictionary of results step by step.

PYTHON 

find_a = soup.find('a')
first_link = {}
first_link['element'] = str(find_a)
first_link['url'] = find_a.get('href')
first_link['text'] = find_a.get_text()

To wrap up this introduction to HTML and BeautifulSoup, let’s write code that extracts all hyperlink elements in a structured way —capturing each link’s tag, destination URL, and display text.

We’ll start with the links variable we created earlier: links = soup.find_all('a'). Then, we’ll loop through each hyperlink element, store the three pieces of information in a dictionary, and append each dictionary to a list called list_of_dicts. At the end, we’ll have a list containing two dictionaries —one for each link— which we can easily convert into a Pandas DataFrame.

PYTHON 

links = soup.find_all('a')
list_of_dicts = []
for item in links:
    dict_a = {}
    dict_a['element'] = str(item)
    dict_a['url'] = item.get('href')
    dict_a['text'] = item.get_text()
    list_of_dicts.append(dict_a)

links_df = pd.DataFrame(list_of_dicts)
print(links_df)

OUTPUT 

                                             element                                                url                      text
0  <a href="https://carpentries.org/">The Carpent...                           https://carpentries.org/  The Carpentries homepage
1  <a href="https://carpentries.org/workshops/pas...  https://carpentries.org/workshops/past-workshops/            past workshops

You can find more detailed information about the BeautifulSoup package and its full range of methods in the BeautifulSoup Documentation.

The internet isn’t as open as it once was. What used to be a vast, freely accessible source of information has become a valuable reservoir of data —especially for training machine learning and generative AI models. In response, many social media platforms and website owners have either started monetizing access to their data or taken steps to protect their resources from being overwhelmed by automated bots.

As a result, it’s increasingly common for websites to include explicit prohibitions against web scraping in their Terms of Service (TOS). To avoid legal or ethical issues, it’s essential to check both the TOS and the site’s robots.txt file before scraping.

You can usually find a site’s robots.txt file by appending /robots.txt to the root of the domain—for example: https://facebook.com/robots.txt (not https://facebook.com/user/robots.txt). Both the TOS and robots.txt will help you understand what is allowed and what isn’t, so it’s important to review them carefully before proceeding.

Challenge

Visit Facebook’s Terms of Service and its robots.txt file. What do they say about web scraping or collecting data using automated means? Compare it to Reddit’s TOS and Reddit’s robots.txt.

In addition to reviewing a website’s policies, you should also be aware of the laws that apply in your region —especially those related to copyright and data privacy. If you’re planning to collect a large amount of data for research or commercial purposes, it’s a good idea to seek legal advice before proceeding. If you’re affiliated with a university, there’s a good chance it has a copyright office or legal team that can help you navigate the legal aspects of your project. The university library is often a great starting point for finding support and guidance on copyright and data use.

To conclude, here is a brief code of conduct you should keep in mind when doing web scraping:

  1. Ask nicely whether you can access the data in another way. If your project relies on data from a particular organization, consider reaching out to them directly or checking whether they provide an API. With a bit of luck, they might offer the data you need in a structured format —saving you time and effort.

  2. Don’t download content that’s clearly not public. For example, academic journal publishers often impose strict usage restrictions on their databases. Mass-downloading PDFs can violate these rules and may get you —or your university librarian— into trouble.

    If you need local copies for a legitimate reason (e.g., text mining), special agreements may be possible. Your university library is a good place to start exploring those options.

  3. Check your local legislation. Many countries have laws protecting personal information, such as email addresses or phone numbers. Even if this data is visible on a website, scraping it could be illegal depending on your jurisdiction (e.g., in Australia).

  4. Don’t share scraped content illegally. Scraping for personal use is often considered fair use, even when it involves copyrighted material. But sharing that data —especially if you don’t have the rights to distribute it— can be illegal.

  5. Share what you can. If the scraped data is public domain or you’ve been granted permission to share it, consider publishing it for others to reuse (e.g., on datahub.io). Also, if you wrote a scraper to access it, sharing your code (e.g., on GitHub) can help others learn from and build on your work.

  6. Publish your own data in a reusable way. Make it easier for others by offering your data in open, software-agnostic formats like CSV, JSON, or XML. Include metadata that describes the content, origin, and intended use of the data. Ensure it’s accessible and searchable by search engines.

  7. Don’t break the Internet. Some websites can’t handle high volumes of requests. If your scraper is recursive (i.e., it follows links), test it first on a small subset.

    Be respectful by setting delays between requests and limiting the rate of access. You’ll learn more about how to do this in the next episode.

Following these guidelines helps ensure that your scraping is ethical, legal, and considerate of the broader web ecosystem.

Key Points

  • Every website is built on an HTML document that structures its content.
  • An HTML document is composed of elements, usually defined by an opening <tag> and a closing </tag>.
  • Elements can have attributes that define their properties, written as <tag attribute_name="value">.
  • We can parse an HTML document using BeautifulSoup() and search for elements with the .find() and .find_all() methods.
    • We can extract the text inside an element with .get_text() and access attribute values using .get("attribute_name").
  • Always review and respect a website’s Terms of Service (TOS) before scraping its content.

Content from Scraping a real website

Last updated on 2025-06-10 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • How can I get the data and information from a real website?
  • How can I start automating my web scraping tasks?

Objectives

  • Use the requests package to retrieve the HTML content of a website.
  • Navigate the tree structure behind an HTML document to extract the information we need.
  • Understand how to avoid being blocked after sending too many requests.

It’s now time to extract information from an actual website: https://carpentries.org. We’ll focus on retrieving data about upcoming and past workshops taught by The Carpentries global community.

To give you a sense of how web scraping can be useful here, we might use this data to analyze which countries have hosted the most workshops, build a live dashboard showing recent trends in instruction, or even create an app that notifies us when a new workshop is scheduled in our region.

With the basic tools shown here, you can build similar apps and analyses using the website(s) you’re interested in. But always keep in mind the code of conduct from the previous episode, especially the first point: there might be an easier and more appropriate way to access the data you need.

In fact, for the example we’re about to explore, The Carpentries provides a list of data feeds that you can use to access information about upcoming and past workshops directly.

“Requests” the website HTML

In the previous episode we used a simple HTML document, not an actual website. Now that we’re moving into a more realistic and complex scenario, we’ll add another tool to our toolbox: the requests package.

For this lesson, we’ll use requests solely to retrieve the HTML content of a website. Keep in mind that requests offers much more functionality, which you can explore in the Requests package documentation.

We’ll be scraping The Carpentries website, specifically the pages listing upcoming and past workshops](https://carpentries.org/workshops/past-workshops/). To do that, we’ll first load the requests package and then use the .get(url) function and the .text property to fetch and store the HTML content of the page.

Additionally, to simplify our navigation through the HTML document, we’ll use the Regular Expressions module re to remove all newline characters (\n) and their surrounding whitespace. You can think of this as a pre-processing or cleaning step. While we won’t go into detail here, you can explore more about the topic in this by Library Carpentry Introduction to Regular Expressions.

PYTHON 

# Loading libraries
import requests
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from time import sleep
import pandas as pd
from tqdm import tqdm

# Getting the HTML from our desired URL as a text string
url = 'https://carpentries.org/workshops/upcoming-workshops/'
req = requests.get(url).text

# Cleaning and printing the string
cleaned_req = re.sub(r'\s*\n\s*', '', req).strip()
print(cleaned_req[0:1000])

OUTPUT 

<!doctype html><html class=scroll-smooth lang=en-us dir=ltr><head><meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content="width=device-width"><title>Upcoming workshops | The Carpentries</title><link rel=preconnect href=https://fonts.googleapis.com><link rel=preconnect href=https://fonts.gstatic.com crossorigin><link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Mulish:ital,wght@0,200..1000;1,200..1000&display=swap" rel=stylesheet><script defer src=https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@glidejs/glide@3.5.x></script><script src=https://kit.fontawesome.com/3a6fac633d.js crossorigin=anonymous></script><link rel=stylesheet href=https://cdn.datatables.net/1.13.6/css/jquery.dataTables.min.css><script src=https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.7.1.min.js></script><script src=https://cdn.datatables.net/1.13.6/js/jquery.dataTables.min.js></script><script src=https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/moment@2.29.1/moment.min.js></script><script src=https://cdn.datatables.net/plug-ins/1.13.6/sorting/datetime-moment.js></script><sc

We truncated the output to show only the first 1000 characters of the document, as it’s too long to display fully. Still, we can confirm it’s HTML and notice some elements that weren’t present in the earlier example, such as <meta>, <link> and <script> tags.

There’s also another way to view the HTML behind a website directly in your web browser. In Google Chrome, you can right-click anywhere on the page (on a Mac, hold the Control key while clicking), then choose “View page source” from the pop-up menu, as shown in the next image. If you don’t see that option, try clicking elsewhere on the page. A new tab will open showing the full HTML document for the site you were viewing.

A screenshot of The Carpentries upcoming workshops website in the Google Chrome web browser, showing how to View page source

In the HTML page source in your browser, you can scroll down to find the first-level header (<h1>) with the text “Upcoming workshops.” An easier way is to use the Find bar (press Ctrl + F on Windows or Command + F on Mac) and search for “Upcoming workshops.”

From that point, you can read the surrounding HTML and compare it to how the content appears on the rendered website. You’ll see how formatting is handled through tags like unordered lists (<ul>), list items (<li>), paragraphs (<p>), and content divisions (<div>).

Finding the information we want

However, carefully reading the entire HTML document to understand its structure and locate the workshop data would be time-consuming. Fortunately, modern web browsers offer a helpful tool called “Inspect”. With this tool, you can examine the specific HTML behind any element on a webpage.

To use it, right-click on the element you’re interested in (or hold the Control key and click, if you’re on a Mac), and then select “Inspect” from the pop-up menu.

Let’s try this with the first item in the Upcoming Workshops list, as shown in the screenshot below. (Keep in mind that your first listed workshop might differ, since the page is updated frequently.)

A screenshot of Google Chrome web browser, showing how to use Inspect from the Chrome DevTools

Using the Inspect feature opens DevTools on the side of your browser. DevTools offers a suite of tools for inspecting, debugging, and analyzing web pages in real-time. For this workshop, we’ll focus on just one: the “Elements” tab.

If you selected the organization name to inspect (as shown in the screenshot), you’ll see an anchor (<a>) element highlighted in the Elements tab. Around it, as its parent, you’ll find a third-level header marked by <h3> tags. This provides a visual example of the tree-like structure we discussed earlier, elements nested inside other elements.

Back in our code, we left off after retrieving the HTML behind the website using the requests package and storing it in a variable named req.

Now, we can use the BeautifulSoup() function to parse that HTML, just like we did before. The code below shows how we create the soup object and use .find_all() to locate all the third-level headers (<h3>) in the page.

PYTHON 

# Parsing the HTML with BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(cleaned_req, 'html.parser')

# Finding all third-level headers and doing a formatted print
h3_by_tag = soup.find_all('h3')
print("Number of h3 elements found: ", len(h3_by_tag))
for n, h3 in enumerate(h3_by_tag):
    print(f"Workshop #{n} - {h3.get_text()}")

Besides searching elements by tag, it’s often useful to search using attributes like id or class. In our case, we can see the h3 elements have a class attribute with multiple values: “title text-base md:text-[1.75rem] leading-[2.125rem] font-semibold”. This set of classes is used to apply styling, and it can help us target all elements that share the same formatting.

So instead of selecting all <h3> tags directly, we can search for elements with this specific class using the class_ argument of .find_all(), like this:

PYTHON 

# An alternative using the "class" attribute, instead of the h3 tag
h3_by_class = soup.find_all(class_="title text-base md:text-[1.75rem] leading-[2.125rem] font-semibold")

This will give us the same elements as before, but demonstrates how to refine your search by class —an especially useful technique when different parts of a webpage use the same tag but serve different purposes.

Extracting data

Let’s go back to our web browser. Using the “Inspect” tool, can you identify the parent of the first <h3> element?

If you guessed a content division element (a <div> tag), you’re right! But exactly which <div> among all those in the HTML? You’ll notice that this parent div stands out because it has a class attribute attribute with the value “p-8 mb-5 border”.

The animation below illustrates that all the information for each workshop is grouped within a <div> element marked by that same class attribute. It also shows how the “Inspect” tool highlights the relevant portion of the webpage when you hover over an HTML element, making it easier to understand the structure and pinpoint the content you want to extract.

All workshop cards share a 'p-8 mb-5 border' class attribute.

Understanding the tree structure of the HTML will help us navigate it and extract the information we want. Navigating this tree is also something we can do with BeautifulSoup. For example, let’s find the parent of the first <h3> element using the .parent property. As expected, this will return the <div> element with the class attribute “p-8 mb-5 border”.

PYTHON 

# Get the parent of the first h3 element and prettify it
div_firsth3 = h3_by_class[0].parent
print(div_firsth3.prettify())

Remember, the output shown here is probably different than yours, as the website is continuously updated.

OUTPUT 

<div class="p-8 mb-5 border" data-country="Puerto Rico" data-curriculum="Software Carpentry (Shell, Git, R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis)" data-meeting="In Person" data-program="Software Carpentry">
 <div class="flex mb-4 -mx-2">
  <div class="flex items-center mx-2">
   <img alt="" class="mx-1" src="/software.svg"/>
   <span class="text-[0.625rem] uppercase">
    Software Carpentry
   </span>
  </div>
  <div class="flex items-center mx-2">
   <img alt="" class="mr-1" height="20" src="/flags/pr.png" width="20"/>
   <span class="text-[0.625rem] uppercase">
    Puerto Rico
   </span>
  </div>
  <div class="flex items-center mx-2">
   <img alt="" class="mx-1" src="/In-Person.svg"/>
   <span class="text-[0.625rem] uppercase">
    In Person
   </span>
  </div>
 </div>
 <h3 class="title text-base md:text-[1.75rem] leading-[2.125rem] font-semibold">
  <a class="underline hover:text-blue-hover text-gray-dark" href="https://dept-ccom-uprrp.github.io/2025-06-04-uprrp-r/">
   University of Puerto Rico
  </a>
 </h3>
 <div class="mb-5 text-lg font-semibold text-gray-mid">
  Software Carpentry (Shell, Git, R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis)
 </div>
 <div class="mb-2 text-xs">
  <strong class="font-bold">
   Instructors
  </strong>
  :
  <span class="instructors">
   Humberto Ortiz-Zuazaga, Airined Montes Mercado
  </span>
 </div>
 <div class="mb-4 text-xs">
  <strong class="font-bold">
   Helpers
  </strong>
  :
  <span class="helpers">
   Isabel Rivera, Diana Buitrago Escobar, Yabdiel Ramos Valerio
  </span>
 </div>
 <div class="text-sm font-semibold text-gray-mid">
  Jun 04 - Jun 10 2025
 </div>
</div>

Taking a careful look, we can start to detect where the information we want is located and how to extract it in a structured way.

We already know the workshop host organization is inside the <h3> element, and from there we can also get the hyperlink to that specific workshop’s website. Within the parent <div>, we can extract additional details such as the curriculum, country, format (in-person or online), and program (Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, The Carpentries).

As shown in the previous episode, we can store all this information in a Python dictionary, which we can later transform into a Pandas DataFrame for easier analysis.

PYTHON 

# Create an empty dictionary and fill it with the info we are interested in
dict_workshop = {}
dict_workshop['host'] = div_firsth3.find('h3').get_text()
dict_workshop['link'] = div_firsth3.find('h3').find('a').get('href')
dict_workshop['curriculum'] = div_firsth3.get('data-curriculum')
dict_workshop['country'] = div_firsth3.get('data-country')
dict_workshop['format'] = div_firsth3.get('data-meeting')
dict_workshop['program'] = div_firsth3.get('data-program')

Ok, that’s the code for extracting information about the first workshop listed, but what about all other workshops? Loop time!

We’ll use the same logic of the previous code block. But first, we’ll find all elements with the class “p-8 mb-5 border”, which we know are the containers for each workshop.

PYTHON 

# Find all divs that match a class attribute
divs = soup.find_all('div', class_="p-8 mb-5 border")

# Create an empty list, and fill it with info on each of the workshops found
workshop_list = []
for item in divs: 
    dict_workshop = {}
    dict_workshop['host'] = item.find('h3').get_text()
    dict_workshop['link'] = div_firsth3.find('h3').find('a').get('href')
    dict_workshop['curriculum'] = div_firsth3.get('data-curriculum')
    dict_workshop['country'] = div_firsth3.get('data-country')
    dict_workshop['format'] = div_firsth3.get('data-meeting')
    dict_workshop['program'] = div_firsth3.get('data-program')
    workshop_list.append(dict_workshop)

# Transform list into a DataFrame
upcomingworkshops_df = pd.DataFrame(workshop_list)

Great! We’ve finished our first scraping task on a real website. Be aware that there are multiple ways of achieving the same result. For example, instead of finding the div elements with the “p-8 mb-5 border” class attribute, we can find the container of all the workshops, a div with a class attribute of “filtered”. Then, we can use a while loop across all its children, each of these being one workshop container. The rest of the code would be the same.

PYTHON 

# Find the container of all the workshops
container = soup.find('div', class_="filtered")

# Use the .contents property to get all the children, and accessing the first element
child_div = container.contents[0]
workshop_list = []

# Create an empty list, and fill it with info on each of the workshops found
while child_div is not None:
    dict_workshop = {}
    dict_workshop['host'] = child_div.find('h3').get_text()
    dict_workshop['link'] = child_div.find('h3').find('a').get('href')
    dict_workshop['curriculum'] = child_div.get('data-curriculum')
    dict_workshop['country'] = child_div.get('data-country')
    dict_workshop['format'] = child_div.get('data-meeting')
    dict_workshop['program'] = child_div.get('data-program')
    workshop_list.append(dict_workshop)

    # Next iteration of the loop will be with the next sibling
    child_div = child_div.next_sibling

# Transform list into a DataFrame
upcomingworkshops_df = pd.DataFrame(workshop_list)
upcomingworkshops_df

A key takeaway from this exercise is that, when we want to scrape data in a structured way, we have to spend some time getting to know how the website is structured and how we can identify and extract only the elements we are interested in.

Challenge

Extract the same information as in the previous exercise, but this time from the Past Workshops Page at https://carpentries.org/past_workshops/. Which 5 countries have held the most workshops, and how many has each held?

We can reuse directly the code we wrote before, changing only the URL we got the HTML from.

PYTHON 

# Get HTML and parse it with BeautifulSoup
url_past = 'https://carpentries.org/workshops/past-workshops/'
req_past = requests.get(url_past).text

soup_past = BeautifulSoup(req_past, 'html.parser')

# Find all divs that match a class attribute
divs_past = soup_past.find_all('div', class_="p-8 mb-5 border")

# Create an empty list, and fill it with info on each of the workshops found
workshop_list = []
for item in divs_past:
    dict_workshop = {}
    dict_workshop['host'] = item.find('h3').get_text()
    dict_workshop['link'] = item.find('h3').find('a').get('href')
    dict_workshop['curriculum'] = item.get('data-curriculum')
    dict_workshop['country'] = item.get('data-country')
    dict_workshop['format'] = item.get('data-meeting')
    dict_workshop['program'] = item.get('data-program')
    workshop_list.append(dict_workshop)

# Transform list into a DataFrame
pastworkshops_df  = pd.DataFrame(workshop_list)

print('Total number of workshops in the table: ', len(pastworkshops_df))

print('Top 5 of countries by number of workshops held: \n',
      pastworkshops_df['country'].value_counts().head())

Challenge

From the same upcoming workshops website, modify the code to also extract the list of instructors, helpers, and the dates of the workshops.

Instructors appear to be inside a span element identified with the “instructors” class attribute. Similarly for helpers. Workshop dates are inside a div element, with a class attribute of value “text-sm font-semibold text-gray-mid”. We only need to add three lines to our loop, and this is how it would look like.

PYTHON 

for item in divs: 
    dict_workshop = {}
    dict_workshop['host'] = item.find('h3').get_text()
    dict_workshop['link'] = item.find('h3').find('a')['href']
    dict_workshop['curriculum'] = item.get('data-curriculum')
    dict_workshop['country'] = item.get('data-country')
    dict_workshop['format'] = item.get('data-meeting')
    dict_workshop['program'] = item.get('data-program')
    dict_workshop['instructor'] = item.find('span', class_ = "instructors").get_text() if item.find('span', class_ = "instructors") is not None else ''
    dict_workshop['helper'] = item.find('span', class_ = "helpers").get_text() if item.find('span', class_ = "helpers") is not None else ''
    dict_workshop['date'] = item.find('div', class_ = "text-sm font-semibold text-gray-mid").get_text()
    workshop_list.append(dict_workshop)

You’ll notice the extra if ... else statements in the instructor and helper extraction. This avoids the code to show an error if the instructors or helpers are not listed in the workshop, and therefore BeautifulSoup can find them in the HTML.

Automating data collection

Until now, we’ve only scraped one website page at a time. However, sometimes the information you need is spread across multiple pages, or you may need to follow a trail of hyperlinks. With the tools we’ve learned so far, handling this task is straightforward. You would simply add a loop that navigates to each page, fetches the HTML using the requests package, and parses it with BeautifulSoup to extract the necessary data.

An important consideration when doing this is to include a wait time between each request to avoid overloading the web server providing the data. Sending too many requests in a short period can disrupt access for other users or even cause the server to crash. If the website detects excessive requests, it might block your IP address to visit the website or, in extreme cases, take legal action.

To prevent this, you can use Python’s built-in time module and its sleep() function to pause between requests. The sleep() function makes Python wait for a specified number of seconds before moving on to the next line of code. For example, the following code pauses for 10 seconds between each print statement.

PYTHON 

from time import sleep
print('First')
sleep(10)
print('Second')

Let’s incorporate this important principle as we extract additional information from each workshop’s individual website. We already have our upcomingworkshops_df DataFrame, which includes a link column containing the URL for each workshop’s webpage. For example, let’s make a request to retrieve the HTML of the first workshop in the DataFrame and take a look.

PYTHON 

# Get the first link from the upcominworkshops dataframe
first_url = upcomingworkshops_df.loc[0, 'link']
print("URL we are visiting: ", first_url)

# Retrieve the HTML
req = requests.get(first_url).text
cleaned_req = re.sub(r'\s*\n\s*', '', req).strip()

# Parse the HTML
soup = BeautifulSoup(cleaned_req, 'html.parser')

If we explore the HTML using the ‘View page source’ or ‘Inspect’ tools in the browser, we notice something interesting inside the <head> element. Because this information is within <head> rather than the <body>, it won’t be displayed directly on the page, but the <meta> elements provide metadata that helps search engines better understand, display, and index the page.

Each <meta> tag contain useful information for our workshop table, for example, such as well-formatted start and end dates, the exact location with latitude and longitude (for in-person workshops), the language of instruction, and a structured listing of instructors and helpers. These data points can be identified by the “name” attribute of the <meta> tags, with the desired information stored in their “content” attributes.

The following code automates extracting this data from each workshop’s website, but only for the first five workshops in our upcomingworkshops_df DataFrame. We limit it to five to avoid sending too many requests at once and overwhelming the server, though we could extend this to all workshops if needed.

PYTHON 

# List of URLs in our dataframe
urls = list(upcomingworkshops_df.loc[:5, 'link'])

# Start an empty list to store the different dictionaries with our data
list_of_workshops = []

# Start a loop over each URL
for item in tqdm(urls):
    # Get the HTML and parse it
    req = requests.get(item).text
    cleaned_req = re.sub(r'\s*\n\s*', '', req).strip()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(cleaned_req, 'html.parser')

    # Start an empty dictionary and fill it with the URL, which
    # is our identifier with our other dataframe
    dict_w = {}
    dict_w['link'] = item

    # Use the find function to search for the <meta> tag that 
    # has each specific 'name' attribute and get the value in the
    # 'content' attribute
    dict_w['startdate'] = soup.find('meta', attrs = {'name': 'startdate'}).get('content')
    dict_w['enddate'] = soup.find('meta', attrs = {'name': 'enddate'}).get('content')
    dict_w['language'] = soup.find('meta', attrs = {'name': 'language'}).get('content')
    dict_w['latlng'] = soup.find('meta', attrs = {'name': 'latlng'}).get('content')
    dict_w['instructor'] = soup.find('meta', attrs = {'name': 'instructor'}).get('content')
    dict_w['helper'] = soup.find('meta', attrs = {'name': 'helper'}).get('content')

    # Append to our list
    list_of_workshops.append(dict_w)

    # Be respectful, wait at least 3 seconds before a new request
    sleep(3)

extradata_upcoming_df = pd.DataFrame(list_of_workshops)

Challenge

It’s possible you encountered an error when running the previous code block. The most likely cause is that the URL you tried to access doesn’t exist. This is known as a 404 error, which means the requested page cannot be found on the web server.

How would you approach handling this kind of error to make your scraping process more robust?

A straightforward Pythonic way to handle errors when accessing URLs is to use a try-except block. This allows you to catch any exceptions that occur when trying to access a URL, ignore the problematic URL, and continue processing the rest.

A cleaner approach is to check the actual HTTP response code returned by the requests call. A status code of 200 means the request was successful and the page exists. For any other response code, you can choose to skip scraping that page and optionally log the code for review.

PYTHON 

req = requests.get(url)
status_code = response.status_code

if status_code == 200:
    # proceed with scraping
else:
    # handle or skip this URL

Key Points

  • Use the requests package with requests.get('website_url').text to retrieve the HTML content of any website.
  • In your web browser, you can explore the HTML structure and identify elements of interest using the “View Page Source” and “Inspect” tools.
  • An HTML document is a nested tree of elements; navigate it by accessing an element’s children (.contents), parent (.parent), and siblings (.next_sibling, .previous_sibling)
  • To avoid overwhelming a website’s server, add delays between requests using the sleep() function from Python’s built-in time module.

Content from Dynamic websites

Last updated on 2025-06-10 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • What are the differences between static and dynamic websites?
  • Why is it important to understand these differences when doing web scraping?
  • How can I start my own web scraping project?

Objectives

  • Use the Selenium package to scrape dynamic websites.
  • Understand the usual pipeline of a web scraping project.

Visit this practice webpage created by Hartley Brody for learning and practicing web scraping: https://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/ajax-javascript/ (but first, read the terms of use). Select “2015” to display that year’s Oscar-winning films. Now try viewing the HTML behind the page, either using the View Page Source tool in your browser or by using Python with the requests and BeautifulSoup packages, as we’ve learned.

Can you find the Best Picture winner Spotlight anywhere in the HTML? Can you find any of the other movies or the data from the table? If not, how could you scrape this page?

When you explore a page like this, you’ll notice that the movie data (including the title Spotlight) isn’t present in the initial HTML source. That’s because the website uses JavaScript to load the information dynamically. JavaScript is a programming language that runs in your browser and allows websites to fetch, process, and display content on the fly — often in response to user actions, like clicking a button.

When you select “2015”, your browser runs JavaScript (triggered by one of the <script> elements in the HTML) to retrieve the relevant movie information from the web server and dynamically update the table. This makes the page feel more interactive, but it also means that the initial HTML you see doesn’t contain the movie data itself.

You can observe this difference when using the “View page source” and “Inspect” tools in your browser: “View page source” shows the original HTML sent by the server, before any JavaScript runs. “Inspect” shows the rendered HTML, after JavaScript has executed and updated the page content.

Because the requests package only retrieves the original source HTML, it won’t work for scraping pages like this. To scrape content that is generated dynamically by JavaScript, we’ll use a different tool: the Selenium package.

Using Selenium to scrape dynamic websites

Selenium is an open-source project for web browser automation. It’s especially useful for scraping tasks because it behaves like a real user interacting with a web page in a browser.

With Selenium, the browser actually renders the page, allowing JavaScript to run and load any dynamic content. This means we can access the fully loaded HTML (just like we’d see using the “Inspect” tool) after JavaScript has executed.

In addition, Selenium can simulate real user interactions like filling in text boxes, clicking buttons, scrolling, or selecting items from drop-down menus. These features are essential when scraping dynamic websites.

To get started, we’ll load the webdriver and By components from the selenium package:

  • webdriver lets us launch or simulate a web browser and interact with it through code.

  • By helps us specify how we want to locate elements in the HTML, by tag name (By.TAG_NAME), class (By.CLASS_NAME), ID (By.ID), name (By.NAME), and more.

We’ll also continue using the other packages introduced in the previous episode.

PYTHON 

# Loading libraries
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import pandas as pd
from time import sleep
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

Selenium can simulate different browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and others. For now, we’ll use Chrome. When you run the following line of code, a new Google Chrome window will open. Don’t close it, this is the browser that Selenium is controlling to interact with the webpage.

Later in the lesson, we’ll learn how to run headless browser sessions. Headless means the browser runs in the background without opening a visible window or user interface, which is useful for automation tasks and running scripts on servers. To direct the browser to the Oscar winners page, use the .get() method on the driver object we just created.

PYTHON 

# Open a Chrome web browser driven by Selenium
driver = webdriver.Chrome()

# Go to a specific website
driver.get("https://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/ajax-javascript/")

How can we direct Selenium to click the “2015” text so the table for that year appears? First, we need to locate that element, similar to how we used .find() and .find_all() with BeautifulSoup. In Selenium, we use .find_element() to get the first matching element, and .find_elements() to get all matches. However, the syntax for specifying search parameters is slightly different.

For example:

  • To select the first <table> element, you’d use: driver.find_element(by=By.TAG_NAME, value="table")

  • To find a row with <tr class="film">, you’d use: driver.find_element(by=By.CLASS_NAME, value="film")

To find the specific element that triggers the display of 2015’s Oscar winners, use the “Inspect” tool in Chrome. Right-click on the “2015” text and choose “Inspect.” In the DevTools panel, you’ll see this HTML element:

HTML 

<a href="#" class="year-link" id="2015">2015</a>
A screenshot of Google Chrome web browser, showing how to search a specific element by using Inspect from the Chrome DevTools

Because the id attribute is unique, we can select this element directly using:

PYTHON 

# Find 2015 element button
button_2015 = driver.find_element(by=By.ID, value="2015")

We’ve located the hyperlink element we need to click to display the table for that year, and we’ll use the .click() method to interact with it. Since the table takes a couple of seconds to load, we’ll use the sleep() function to pause while the JavaScript runs and the table loads. Next, we’ll use driver.page_source to retrieve the updated HTML content from the website and store it in a variable called html_2015. Finally, we’ll close the browser window Selenium opened using driver.quit().

PYTHON 

# Click 2015 button
button_2015.click()

# Wait for table to load
sleep(3)

# Retrieve page HTML
html_2015 = driver.page_source

# Close web browser
driver.quit()

Importantly, the HTML document we stored in html_2015 is the HTML after the dynamic content loaded. This content wasn’t present in the original HTML and wouldn’t be accessible if we had used the requests package alone.

While we could continue using Selenium’s .find_element() and .find_elements() methods to extract the data, we’ll switch back to BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML and locate elements, since we already have practice with it. For example, if we search for the first element with the class attribute “film” and retrieve its text, we’ll see that the HTML now includes the movie “Spotlight.”

PYTHON 

# Parse HTML and 
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_2015, 'html.parser')
print(soup.find(class_='film').prettify())

OUTPUT 

<tr class="film">
 <td class="film-title">
  Spotlight
 </td>
 <td class="film-nominations">
  6
 </td>
 <td class="film-awards">
  2
 </td>
 <td class="film-best-picture">
  <i class="glyphicon glyphicon-flag">
  </i>
 </td>
</tr>

The following code repeats the process of clicking and loading the 2015 data, but now in “headless” mode (meaning the browser runs in the background without opening a visible window). After the data loads, the code extracts information from the table one column at a time, using the fact that each column has a unique class attribute. Instead of writing traditional for loops to extract the text from each element returned by .find_all(), we use list comprehensions, which provide a more concise way to generate lists. You can learn more about them reading Python’s documentation on list comprehensions or this short tutorial by Programiz.

PYTHON 

# Create the Selenium webdriver and make it headless
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("--headless=new")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)

# Load the website. Find and click 2015. Get post JavaScript execution HTML. Close webdriver
driver.get("https://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/ajax-javascript/")
button_2015 = driver.find_element(by=By.ID, value="2015")
button_2015.click()
sleep(3)
html_2015 = driver.page_source
driver.quit()

# Parse HTML using BeautifulSoup and extract each column as a list of values ising list comprehensions
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_2015, 'html.parser')
titles_lc = [elem.get_text() for elem in soup.find_all(class_="film-title")]
nominations_lc = [elem.get_text() for elem in soup.find_all(class_="film-nominations")]
awards_lc = [elem.get_text() for elem in soup.find_all(class_="film-awards")]

# For the best picture column, we can't use .get_text() as there is no text
# Rather, we want to see if there is an <i> tag
best_picture_lc = ["Yes" if elem.find("i") == None else "No" for elem in soup.find_all(class_="film-best-picture")]

# Create a dataframe based on the previous lists
movies_2015 = pd.DataFrame(
    {'titles': titles_lc, 'nominations': nominations_lc, 'awards': awards_lc, 'best_picture': best_picture_lc}
)

Challenge

Using what we’ve learned in this episode, write a Python script that collects Oscar-winning film data for all years from 2010 to 2015 from Hartley Brody’s website. Hint: Reuse the code you wrote to scrape the 2015 data, and place it inside a loop that goes through each year.

In addition to looping through each year, the following solution changes the code by defining two functions: one that finds and clicks on a year and returns the HTML after the data loads, and another that takes this HTML, parses it, and extracts the data into a DataFrame.

To let you observe how Selenium opens the browser and interacts with the page, this version does not use the “headless” option.

PYTHON 

# Function to search year hyperlink and click it
def findyear_click_gethtml(year):
    button = driver.find_element(by=By.ID, value=year)
    button.click()
    sleep(3)
    html = driver.page_source
    return html

# Function to parse html, extract table data, and assign year column
def parsehtml_extractdata(html, year):
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
    titles_lc = [elem.get_text() for elem in soup.find_all(class_="film-title")]
    nominations_lc = [elem.get_text() for elem in soup.find_all(class_="film-nominations")]
    awards_lc = [elem.get_text() for elem in soup.find_all(class_="film-awards")]
    best_picture_lc = ["No" if elem.find("i") == None else "Yes" for elem in soup.find_all(class_="film-best-picture")]
    movies_df = pd.DataFrame(
        {'titles': titles_lc, 'nominations': nominations_lc, 'awards': awards_lc, 'best_picture': best_picture_lc, 'year': year}
    )
    return movies_df

# Open Selenium webdriver and go to the page
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/ajax-javascript/")

# Create empty dataframe where we will append/concatenate the dataframes we get for each year
result_df = pd.DataFrame()

for year in ["2010", "2011", "2012", "2013", "2014", "2015"]:
    html_year = findyear_click_gethtml(year)
    df_year = parsehtml_extractdata(html_year, year)
    result_df = pd.concat([result_df, df_year])

# Close the browser that Selenium opened
driver.quit()

Challenge

If you’re ready for a break from scraping table data like we’ve done in the last two episodes, try this new exercise to practice working with dynamic websites. Visit this product page created by scrapingcourse.com and extract the name and price of each product, along with the hyperlink from each product card to its detailed view page.

Once you’ve done that, and if you’re up for an additional challenge, visit each product’s detail page and scrape its SKU, Category, and Description.

To identify the elements that contain the data you need, start by using the “Inspect” tool in your browser. The screenshot below shows an example from the website, where each product card is a <div> element with several attributes that help narrow down your search.

A screenshot of Google Chrome web browser, highlighting the `<div>` element that contains the data we want about the product

For instance, you can target these product cards by selecting <div> elements with the attribute 'data-testid'='product-item'. Once you’ve found all the relevant <div> elements, you can extract the necessary information from each:

  • Hyperlink: This is the href attribute of the <a> tag within each product card.

  • Product name: This is inside a <span> tag with the class attribute 'product-name'.

  • Price: This is also inside a <span> tag, and we can identify it using the attribute 'data-content'='product-price'.

PYTHON 

# Open Selenium webdriver in headless mode and go to the desired page
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("--headless=new")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
driver.get("https://www.scrapingcourse.com/javascript-rendering")

# As we don't have to click anything, just wait for the JavaScript to load, we can get the HTML right away
sleep(3)
html = driver.page_source

# Parste the HTML
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
# Find all <div> elements that have a 'data-testid' attribute with the value of 'product-item'
divs = soup.find_all("div", attrs = {'data-testid': 'product-item'})

# Loop through the <div> elements we found, and for each get the href,
# the name (inside a <span> element with attribute class="product-name")
# and the price (inside a <span> element with attribute data-content="product-price"
list_of_dicts = []
for div in divs:
    # Create a dictionary to store the data we want for each product
    item_dict = {
        'link': div.find('a')['href'],
        'name': div.find('span', attrs = {'class': 'product-name'}).get_text(),
        'price': div.find('span', attrs = {'data-content': 'product-price'}).get_text()
    }
    list_of_dicts.append(item_dict)

all_products = pd.DataFrame(list_of_dicts)

We could arrive to the same result if we replace the for loop with list comprehensions. So here is another possible solution with that approach.

PYTHON 

links = [elem['href'] for elem in soup.find_all('a', attrs = {'class': 'product-link'})]
names = [elem.get_text() for elem in soup.find_all('span', attrs = {'class': 'product-name'})]
prices = [elem.get_text() for elem in soup.find_all('span', attrs = {'data-content': 'product-price'})]
all_products_v2 = pd.DataFrame(
    {'link': links, 'name': names, 'price': prices}
)

The scraping pipeline

By now, you’ve learned the core tools for web scraping: requests, BeautifulSoup, and Selenium. Together, these tools form a powerful and flexible pipeline that can handle most scraping tasks. When starting a new scraping project, following a few key steps will help ensure you capture the data you need efficiently and responsibly.

The first step is to understand the structure of the website. Every site organizes its content differently, so take time to explore the page, inspect elements, and identify the HTML tags and attributes that hold the information you’re after.

Next, determine whether the content is static or dynamic. Static content is part of the initial HTML and can be accessed directly using requests and parsed with BeautifulSoup. Dynamic content, on the other hand, is loaded or updated by JavaScript after the initial page load, and typically requires Selenium to render the page fully before parsing.

Once you’ve identified how the content is delivered, build your scraping pipeline. For static content, make a request using requests.get() and pass the HTML to BeautifulSoup to locate and extract the relevant elements. For dynamic pages, use Selenium to open the page in a browser, interact with the page as needed (e.g., clicking buttons, selecting dropdowns), and retrieve the updated HTML with driver.page_source. Then use BeautifulSoup to parse and extract the data.

Finally, clean, format, and store the data in a structured format, such as a list of dictionaries or a Pandas DataFrame, so it’s ready for analysis or export.

Following this pipeline helps you break down complex tasks into clear, manageable steps and choose the right tools for the job With practice, you’ll be able to adapt this process to scrape and organize data from a wide range of websites.

Key Points

  • Dynamic websites load content using JavaScript, so the data may not be present in the initial HTML. It’s important to distinguish between static and dynamic content when planning your scraping approach.
  • The Selenium package and its webdriver module simulates a real browser, allowing you to execute JavaScript and interact with the page as a user would —clicking, scrolling, or filling out forms
  • Key Selenium commands:
    • webdriver.Chrome(): Launch the Chrome browser simulator
    • .get("website_url"): Visit a given website
    • .find_element(by, value) and .find_elements(by, value): Locate one or multiple elements
    • .click(): Click a selected element
    • .page_source: Retrieve the full HTML after JavaScript execution
    • .quit(): Close the browser
  • The browser’s “Inspect” tool allows users to view the HTML document after dynamic content has loaded. This is useful for identifying which elements contain the data you want to scrape.
  • A typical web scraping pipeline includes: 1) Understanding the website structure; 2) Determining whether content is static or dynamic; 3) Choosing the right tools (requests + BeautifulSoup or Selenium); 4) Extracting and cleaning the data; 5) Storing the data in a structured format.