What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is a website extraction technique that pulls vital information. Software programs that scrape the web usually simulate human exploration of the web by either implementing low-level Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or embedding a full-fledged web browser, such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox.

Web scraping is an automated method used to extract large amounts of data from websites. The data on the websites are unstructured. Web scraping helps collect these unstructured data and store it in a structured form. There are different ways to scrape websites such as online Services, APIs or writing your own code.

For example, Beautiful Soup (bs4, which is the most up-to-date version) is a Python library used for extracting data from HTML and XML files. It works with your favorite parser to provide ways to navigate, search, and modify the parse tree. Because of its capabilities, it helps programmers eliminate the amount of work they need to complete manually.