Web Scraping with Python: A Practical Guide

Why Web Scraping?

Automate data collection from websites. Useful for research, price monitoring, and content aggregation.

Setup

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

Basic Example

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "https://example.com"
response = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")

titles = soup.find_all("h2")
for title in titles:
    print(title.text)

Handling Pagination

Loop through pages by modifying the URL parameters.

Best Practices

• Respect robots.txt
• Add delays between requests
• Use headers to mimic a browser
• Cache results locally

Alternatives

• Scrapy for large-scale scraping
• Playwright for JavaScript-heavy sites
• APIs when available (always prefer)