What is Web Scraping and is Python the Best Language for It?

The internet is a mother lode of content that you can use for various purposes. Web scrapers provide us with the tools to extract this data from the web’s numerous pages. You can then use this data for any purpose you wish, or even for recordkeeping. Here’s everything you need to know about web scraping.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from a website for the purpose of research, business intelligence, and other operations. Generally, we can get data from the internet to get more information to enable us to make informed decisions.

Most web browsers don’t have the built-in option to get the data you want. That is why we use Web scraping to automate the process of getting that data and not have to do it manually.

How Does Web Scraping Work?

Data scrapers on the web are simply intelligent robots responsible for extracting the HTML code of the website you want to scrape and compiling it into well-structured data so you can retrieve the desired data with ease. The process is simple:

1. First, the scraper sends a request to the webpage it is targeting using an HTTP protocol.
2. The page then processes the request and, if it finds it valid, the scraper is allowed to access and retrieve the HTML of the page.
3. The data is sorted and the required elements are saved in a suitable format.

That’s the whole process simplified. However, as web pages become more dynamic, scrapers have to adapt to the changing times. With the help of a suitable programming language, you can continue extracting data even as the world of web scraping continues to broaden.

Web Scraping Languages

Extracting data from websites comes with a host of challenging processes, including communication, task scheduling, and coding. It can be a whole different stressful experience, but the coding language you use will have a significant impact on your website crawling efficiency as a whole. When choosing a web scraping language, scalability, flexibility, and ease of coding are all considerations that you must have in mind. So, what is the best language to use for web scraping? Among various languages, Python is simply the most efficient language to use.

Using Python for Web Scraping

When you start web scraping with Python, you don’t need to start from scratch, as there are various third-party libraries dedicated to web scraping. You just need to find the best one for your language.

For Python, you can use various libraries, such as Pandas, Selenium, and BeautifulSoup. However, Selenium is the most suitable library, as it uses WebDriver for Chrome to test requests and process web pages that you need. When scraping data with Selenium, it works like a bot, entering forms, clicking buttons, and searching for bits of information that you need. Besides the libraries that Python has, there are more reasons why it is the best language for web scraping, let’s look at them.

What makes Python the best programming language?

Python’s web scraping ability has gained popularity for a good reason. Among the many programs and languages you can use, here’s why Python is the most suitable.

1. Coding is Simple and to the Point

Python is by far the easiest language to write. It is an elementary language that utilizes only a small fraction of the coding to achieve the same results as other languages would. When using Python, you can provide even the most complicated commands in fewer characters and lines. This simplicity makes coding for web-scraping quicker, straight to the point, and more desirable.

2. High Performance

Python includes tools such as Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, and Python Requests, which are some of the most functional frameworks for extracting data and crawling the web. Many programmers employ these tools to develop top-level web scrapers for quick and efficient data extraction. The scrapers are also easy to debug, as they contain several debugging tools to allow secure and uninterrupted programming.

3. Flexibility

Python is an all-rounded programming language. The tools, frameworks, and libraries that it contains can be used to build a web scraper that will be useful for multiple purposes. Besides data extraction, Python can help you develop a scraper that can extract data, visualize it, and even parse it.

4. Data Organization

Scraping data can be a demanding process in itself. But it can even get worse when extracting data from business or statistical websites that contain huge amounts of figures, variables, and general information. To simplify this, Pandas is a Python library that can help you transform the scraped data into useful information that you can easily process.

5. Reusability

Python is an object-oriented programming language that supports code modularization. This involves writing codes that you use for various purposes in blocks to separate them from each other. You can then assign each code a name as its identity, so that the next time you need to use it, you can call it out by name and not search for the whole code. This makes your job easier and increases the execution speed.

Tips for Scraping Data with Selenium

While Python may be easy to use, these tips will come in handy when scraping the web.

Time Your Requests

Even if you’re scraping a lot of data from the web, it is crucial to be patient. Sending hundreds of requests in a short time may trigger a Captcha or make the website block your IP. Therefore, you should have timeout breaks between requests to make it as natural as possible.

Error Handling

Websites are dynamic, meaning they can change their structure at any time. If you are using the same web scraper frequently, error handling is essential when you’re waiting for an element, extracting data from the results, or making a request.

Web scraping can be very difficult as websites continue to enforce regulations that add obstacles in the way. Having proper knowledge of web scraping with python can help you overcome these obstacles or prevent websites from employing them. As long as the data you want can be lawfully extracted and used, taking all these things into consideration will be enough to achieve your goal.