Readings: Web Scraping Summary

• Web scraping is defined as the process of finding web documents and extracting usable information from it. Web scraping is different from web crawling. Web crawling is the method of iteratively fetching links starting from a basic seed URL. Web scraping is a subset of web crawling.
• Web scraping is an automated method used to extract large amounts of data from websites. The data on the websites are unstructured. Web scraping helps collect these unstructured data and store it in a structured form. There are different ways to scrape websites such as online Services, APIs or writing your own code.
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• There are many methods or ways in which we can extract information from live hosted websites. Majorly when you do not have access or facility of ready web API available to get the logs or data. You can use web scraping to download the web data on to your local machine using python.
• Python is the most popular language for web scraping. It is a complete product because it can handle almost all processes related to data extraction smoothly.
• The reason why Python is a preferred language to use for web scraping is that Scrapy and Beautiful Soup are two of the most widely employed frameworks based on Python.
• Beautiful Soup- it is a Python library that is designed for fast and highly efficient data extraction.