Summary
In this topic, we looked at the structure of an HTML document. HTML documents are the cornerstone of the World Wide Web and, given the amount of data that's contained on it, we can easily infer the importance of HTML as a data source.
We learned about bs4 (BeautifulSoup4), a Python library that gives us Pythonic ways to read and query HTML documents. We used bs4 to load an HTML document and also explored several different ways to navigate the loaded document. We also got necessary information about the difference between all of these methods.
We looked at how we can create a pandas DataFrame from an HTML document (which contains a table). Although there are some built-in ways to do this job in pandas, they fail as soon as the target table is encoded inside a complex hierarchy of elements. So, the knowledge we gathered in this topic by transforming an HTML table into a pandas DataFrame in a step-by-step manner is invaluable.
Finally, we looked at how we can create a stack in our code...