It happens pretty often that we want to use data in a project that is not yet available in our databases or on our disks, but can be found on the Internet. In such situations, one option might be to get the IT department or a data engineer at our company to extend our data warehouse to scrape, process, and load the data into our database as shown in the following diagram:
On the other hand, if we have no ETL system (to Extract, Transform, and Load data) or simply just cannot wait a few weeks for the IT department to implement our request, we are on our own. This is pretty standard for the data scientist, as most of the time we are developing prototypes that can be later transformed into products by software developers. To this end, a variety of skills are required in the daily round, including the following topics that we will cover in this chapter:
Downloading data programmatically from the Web
Processing XML and JSON formats
Scraping and parsing data from...