Web scraping for beginners

Almost everyone that has used the internet has web scraped. Surprising right? But if you have ever copied any information from the internet and pasted it for your personal use? Then you have web scraped. Only that you did it on a minuscule scale. While Web scrapers are the tools used to carry out the better version of copy and paste, proxy services will protect your IP addresses from being blocked.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping also is known as web extraction or web harvesting is the process of gathering and analyzing raw data from websites. The difference between web scraping and copying and pasting is the fact web scraping uses a more advanced method in retrieving data from websites, unlike copying and pasting that uses the boring manual method.

With the internet, human beings are given accessibility to a myriad of information. I cannot begin to imagine how it was like for our fathers. It must have been difficult because, now, with just typing a few words on the internet, you're presented with a lot of answers to choose from. Now, this is where web scraping comes in very handy.

With web scraping, you're able to glean the internet for information from different sources with effective and efficient web scrapers. The good news is that there are a lot of free web scrapers on the internet while for the others, you have to pay for premium services.

Is web scraping legal?

The answer to this question depends solely on who you are asking and the website you intend on using your web scraper on. Web scraping has been around for quite a long time and some websites are still not comfortable with the concept.

Most websites have reasons for preventing web scrapers from having access to their websites but still, the importance of web scraping cannot be overemphasized. For example, Google maps explicitly restrict users from requesting a lot of results at the same time. Every website with its own use.

If you break their rules your IP address might end up being blocked by the server, so one has to be careful. Like I said at the beginning proxy services will help protect your IP address. But how does proxy do it? Proxy services are used by web scrapers to set proxy server addresses that protect your IP address during data harvesting and parsing.

There is no definite answer to this question. There is just you, your web scraper, and your IP address and proxy server.

What is the best programing language for web scraping?

There are certain qualities to look out for in the programming language you decide to use for web scraping. The truth is most of us tend to start with the language that we are familiar with and that is cool, no need stressing.

There are generally accepted characteristics that make a programming language appropriate. These characteristics include; tenability, operational ability to feed database, flexibility, crawling effectiveness, ease of coding, and scalability.

Having said that, the most preferred language used by programmers for web scraping is python. Python is the most used because it can handle most of the processes related to data harvesting without any glitch and it is easily understandable.

How to scrape data from the internet using python

As we all know python has different applications and libraries for various purposes. Some include; beautiful soup, selenium, and pandas. To get started there are certain things you need to put in place before you commence. Firstly, you need to select a convenient browser. It can be Google chrome browser, python 2.x, or Python 3.x with different libraries installed.

Written below is a step by step tutorial on how to use python for web scraping.

●       Import libraries to create a dataset. It can be any of the libraries listed above.

●       Find the website you want to scrape. This is where you make your choice on the website you want to scrape and if it contains the information you require.

●       Understand the website and how it is structured.

●       Carefully inspect the website. The data for scraping is usually in nested tags. That is why you need to check to see under which tag the information you require is being nested. To inspect, just right click on an element and click on "inspect".

●       Write the code using python, but first by creating a python file.

●       Run the code and it automatically extracts data.

●       Store the data in a preferred format.

With the information contained in this article; readers without any former knowledge on the subject should be able to understand what web scraping is.