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.
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.
