Web Scraping

This module covers pulling structured data out of live web pages, and talking to APIs directly from Python. Web scraping is downloading a page’s HTML and extracting the data you actually want out of it. That’s useful whenever a site doesn’t offer an API of its own.

Why This Matters

Not every source of data online gives you a clean API. Scraping is the fallback that lets you get structured data out of ordinary web pages, and it’s a skill that pairs directly with everything you’ve already learned: strings, loops, dictionaries, and file I/O all show up here.

What You’ll Learn

• What web scraping is, and why robots.txt matters before you scrape anything
• Parsing HTML with BeautifulSoup: find, find_all, .select(), and .text
• Downloading a real page and saving what you extract to a file
• Making HTTP GET and POST requests to APIs with the requests module
• Extracting exact patterns from text with regular expressions

Outcome

By the end of this module, you’ll be able to pull data from a live website end to end: download it, extract what matters (down to a specific pattern if you need to), and save it somewhere useful.

Let’s get started.