Building a Simple Web Scraper with Python

📝 Installing Required Libraries

Before we start, you need to install the required Python libraries:

bash
pip install requests beautifulsoup4

⚠️ Note: Always check the website’s robots.txt and avoid sending too many requests. Web scraping should respect website policies.

📌 Example: Extracting News Titles

Here’s a simple example that fetches news titles:

python
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# URL to scrape
url = "https://news.ycombinator.com/"

# Send request to the website
response = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")

# Extract news titles
titles = soup.select(".titlelink")
for i, title in enumerate(titles[:10], 1):
    print(f"{i}. {title.get_text()}")

This script prints the top 10 news titles from Hacker News.

✅ Key Steps in Web Scraping

1. Send a Request – Get the HTML content of the page.
2. Parse the HTML – Use BeautifulSoup or another parser to process the HTML.
3. Extract Data – Select the elements you want using CSS selectors or XPath.
4. Store Data – Save the scraped data to a file or database.

“Web scraping is like automating your browser to collect data you need, but always play nice and respect website rules.” – Anonymous

🔧 Tips for Beginners

• Use time.sleep() between requests to avoid overloading the server.
• Check the website’s terms of service before scraping.
• Start with simple static websites before moving on to dynamic content.