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Introduction to Web Scraping with Python and BeautifulSoup
Web scraping is a powerful technique used to extract data from websites. It is widely used for data collection, market analysis, and competitive research. In this guide, we’ll introduce you to web scraping using Python and the BeautifulSoup library.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping involves programmatically extracting data from web pages. This can be done using various libraries in Python, with BeautifulSoup being one of the most popular for parsing HTML and XML documents.
Legal and Ethical Considerations
Before scraping a website, make sure to check its robots.txt file to understand its policies on web scraping. Always respect the website's terms of service and avoid overloading their servers with frequent requests.
Setting Up Your Environment
Installing Required Libraries
To get started with web scraping, you’ll need to install the requests and beautifulsoup4 libraries.
pip install requests beautifulsoup4
