Web scraping is a powerful way to collect data from websites. Here are my favorite Python libraries that make this task easier and more efficient.
Beautiful Soup
Beautiful Soup is my go-to library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It creates a parse tree that can be navigated and searched easily.
- Easy to use syntax
- Great documentation
- Handles malformed HTML well
Requests
The Requests library makes HTTP requests simple and intuitive. It's essential for fetching web pages.
- Clean API design
- Handles sessions and cookies
- Built-in JSON decoding
Selenium
When you need to interact with JavaScript-heavy sites, Selenium is invaluable.
- Automates browser actions
- Handles dynamic content
- Supports multiple browsers
Code Example
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = 'https://example.com'
response = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')