Web Scraping with Python: BeautifulSoup, Requests & Selenium

Web Scraping (also termed Screen Scraping, Web Data Extraction, Web Harvesting, etc.) is a technique for extracting large amounts of data from websites  and save the the extracted data to a local file or to a database.

In this course, you will learn how to perform web scraping using Python 3 and the Beautiful Soup, a free open-source library written in Python for parsing HTML.

We will use lxml, which is an extensive library for parsing XML and HTML documents very quickly; it can even handle messed up tags. We will also be using the Requests module instead of the already built-in urllib2 module due to improvements in speed and readability.

Finally, we will use Selenium alongside Beautiful Soup to crawl AJAX & JavaScript driven pages.

The course cover the following topics: accessing web pages programmatically; scraping web pages to extract the required data using Beautiful Soup to parse web pages; interacting with web pages to do different things with them programmatically; and using Selenium for web scraping and when we need it.

By the end of this course, you will be able to understand how websites and servers function, diverse data extraction techniques, and methods of handling and organizing data.

This Web Scraping course covers the following topics:

• Review of data structures (Lists, Dictionaries, Tuples, File Handling)
• How websites are hosted on servers
• Calls to the server (GET, POST methods)
• Review of HTML and CSS
• Requests Module and BeautifulSoup Module overview
• Parsing HTML using BeautifulSoup
• Filtering elements using BeautifulSoup and navigating the Parse Tree
• JavaScript and AJAX overview
• Selenium and the need for it
• Selecting elements using Selenium 
• CSS selectors 
• XPath selectors 
• Navigating pages using Selenium 
• Practical Projects