
Its wide support of popular programming languages means that programmers can choose whatever language they're most comfortable with. Think of it as a barebones web browser that executes JavaScript and renders HTML back to your script. Selenium is a general-purpose web page rendering tool designed for automated testing. It's ideal for small projects where you know the structure of the web pages to parse. Beautiful Soup is very straightforward to get running and relatively simple to use. For example, you'll need the requests library to get the HTML page source into your script before you can start parsing it. 🚀 Try BlazeMeter today to take your testing with Selenium, Beautiful Soup, and others to the next level >īeautiful Soup requires other Python dependencies to function fully. Filtering a page through CSS selectors is a useful scraping strategy that this library unlocks.
#WEB SCRAPING WITH BEAUTIFUL SOUP CODE#
Python programmers using BeautifulSoup can ingest a web page's source code and filter through it to find whatever's needed.įor example, it can discover HTML elements by ID or class name and output what's found for further processing or reformatting. What is the BeautifulSoup Python Package?īeautiful Soup is a Python library built explicitly for scraping structured HTML and XML data.


But what if a site doesn't give up its data easily?ĭevelopers who are not offered APIs or CSV downloads can still retrieve the information they need using tools like Beautiful Soup and Selenium. It offers the recipient pre-structured data that's simple to sort into structured datasets. Researchers can take disparate evidence pulled from multiple web sources and draw statistical conclusions.Īn API is the preferred way of piping information from outside sources as it cuts down on development time by simplifying data retrieval.

The limitless amounts of data available online can be downloaded and analyzed in a variety of ways. How do you scrape websites? Selenium? Beautiful Soup?
