Basic Web Scraping

Web scraping is another common way to acquire data. Given that we are in the information era, the quantity of data available online is enormous. Currently, around 2.5 quintillion bytes (2.5 followed by 18 zeros) is produced every day. Some experts estimate that 90% of all the data ever produced by humanity was generated within the last 2 years (https://cloudtweaks.com/2015/03/how-much-data-is-produced-every-day/). So, if you need data, there’s plenty around.

But before I move on with this section, I’d like to include this disclaimer. Although web scraping is legal, there are some rules and ethical standards that we must follow when scraping data from a website.

First, we must respect private data and never use it without permission, as it belongs to other people or companies. The rule is to always look for public data, especially if it is provided via APIs, because that means that the datasets were reviewed and made available for use under defined...