Is Python good for web scraping?

Short answer: Yes!

Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world thanks to its ease of use & learn, its large community and its portability. This language also dominates all modern data-related fields, including data analysis, machine learning and web scraping.

Writing a Hello World program in Python is much easier than most other programming languages, especially C-Like languages, here is how you can do that:

print("Hello World")​​​​​​​

​​​​​​​That's it!

To scrape a web page in Python, we can use an amazing library called requests, it is the most popular tool to scrape websites in Python, and it is also very easy to use.

Here is an example on how to scrape ScrapingBee's blog using requests:

# To install requests, you can use this command in your terminal: pip install requests
import requests
url = 'https://scrapingbee.com/blog'
r = requests.get(url)
print(r.content)

And the results will be ScrapingBee's HTML source code:

b'<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html lang="en">\n    <head>\n    <title>ScrapingBee&#39;s Blog | ScrapingBee </title>\n    <meta charset="utf-8" />\n    <meta name="description" content="We help you get better at web-scraping: detailed tutorials, case studies and writings by industry experts." />\n    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" initial-scale="1" maximum-scale="1" />\n    \n        <meta property="og:type" content="article" />\n        <meta property="og:title" content="ScrapingBee&#39;s Blog" />\n        <meta property="og:description" content="We help you get better at web-scraping: detailed tutorials, case studies and writings by industry experts." />\n        <meta property="og:type" content="website" />\n        <meta property="og:image" content="https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/cover.png" />\n        <meta property="og:url" content="https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/" />....'

You can then parse this HTML code using a tool like BeautifulSoup to extract relevant information that you can read and use.

 

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