Preface

Web scraping is now widely used to get data from websites. Whether it be e-mails, contact information, or selling prices of items, we rely on web scraping techniques as they allow us to collect large data with minimal effort, and also, we don't require database or other backend access to get this data as they are represented as web pages.

Beautiful Soup allows us to get data from HTML and XML pages. This book helps us by explaining the installation and creation of a sample website scraper using Beautiful Soup. Searching and navigation methods are explained with the help of simple examples, screenshots, and code samples in this book. The different parser support offered by Beautiful Soup, supports for scraping pages with encodings, formatting the output, and other tasks related to scraping a page are all explained in detail. Apart from these, practical approaches to understanding patterns on a page, using the developer tools in browsers will enable you to write similar scrapers for any other website.

Also, the practical approach followed in this book will help you to design a simple web scraper to scrape and compare the selling prices of various books from three websites, namely, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and PacktPub.