Book Image

Getting Started with Beautiful Soup

By : Vineeth G Nair
Book Image

Getting Started with Beautiful Soup

By: Vineeth G Nair

Overview of this book

Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree: a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need without writing excess code for an application. It doesn't take much code to write an application using Beautiful Soup. Getting Started with Beautiful Soup is a practical guide to Beautiful Soup using Python. The book starts by walking you through the installation of each and every feature of Beautiful Soup using simple examples which include sample Python codes as well as diagrams and screenshots wherever required for better understanding. The book discusses the problems of how exactly you can get data out of a website and provides an easy solution with the help of a real website and sample code. Getting Started with Beautiful Soup goes over the different methods to install Beautiful Soup in both Linux and Windows systems. You will then learn about searching, navigating, content modification, encoding support, and output formatting with the help of examples and sample Python codes for each example so that you can try them out to get a better understanding. This book is a practical guide for scraping information from any website. If you want to learn how to efficiently scrape pages from websites, then this book is for you.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Getting Started with Beautiful Soup
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using search methods to scrape information from a web page


In Chapter 2, Creating a BeautifulSoup Object, we discussed the fetching of information related to all books published by Packt Publishing available at the link http://www.packtpub.com/books. In the following exercise, we will use Beautiful Soup searching methods to scrape all books from the preceding URL. We will scrape the name of the book, published date, and price from the preceding URL.

The first step involved in this exercise is to analyze the HTML document and to understand its logical structure. This will help us to understand how the required information is stored within the HTML document.

We can use the Google Chrome developer tools to understand the logical structure of the page. Let us do that by performing the following steps:

  1. Open the page in the Google Chrome browser.

  2. Right-click on it and select the Inspect Element option.

  3. Now, we can see the Developer tools window at the bottom of the page.

The previous URL content under...