Summary

In this chapter, we explored and learned about parsing and extracting data from the web using Beautiful Soup and Scrapy.

So far, in this book, we have identified many libraries and techniques that are effective and suitable for web scraping. Beautiful Soup equips developers with a handful of features to parse, traverse, and create a crawler. Scrapy provides the same features as Beautiful Soup and can be used for data extraction, but is more of a project-based framework that uses lots of libraries behind the scenes and enables you to focus only on your tasks. Because of Scrapy’s easy-to-implement and collaborative architecture, it’s quite popular among beginners, professionals, and even web-based service providers such as Zyte, ScrapeOps, and Apify.

In the next chapter, we will learn about and explore more scraping techniques and security-related issues.