Web Development

Have you ever wondered why you should hire Python developers for web scraping?

Python is a powerful, object-oriented, interactive programming language featuring flexible semantics. It suits a variety of projects, from simple to complex and is widely used in different spheres such as travel, healthcare, transportation, finance, and this language also dominates all modern data-related fields, including data analysis, machine learning and web scraping.

Web scraping refers to employing a program or algorithm to retrieve and process substantial amounts of data from the internet. While you can employ several third-party web scraping services, sometimes they don’t have what you want. Hence, it would help if you built your own; and developers love to use Python for the job. 

Why do you need to hire Python developers and build an in-house web scraping tool?

• To have more control over the data collected and to ensure that it is being collected in a compliant manner.
• The tool can be tailored to the organization’s specific needs, such as collecting data from particular websites or in a specific format.
• It can also lead to cost savings as the organization would not have to rely on third-party tools.
• This tool increases the organization’s ability to scale its data collection efforts as needed.

Now that you are convinced, let’s learn how to use Python for web scraping:

1. Preparation: When installing Python, make sure to check “PATH installation”. PATH installation adds executables to the default Command Prompt executable search. 
2. Inspect your data source: You’ll need to understand the site structure to extract the information that’s relevant for you. Click through the site and interact with it.
3. Inspect URL: Become familiar with how URLs work and what they’re made of as they can hold more information than just the location of a file. 
4. Start scraping: you’ll want to get the site’s HTML code into your Python script so that you can interact with it. For this task, you’ll use Python’s library. There are several types of Python web scraping libraries from which you can choose:

Requests – Simplifies the process of sending HTTP requests to a website’s server by reducing the lines of code, in effect making the code easier to understand and debug without impacting its effectiveness.

Beautiful Soup – Provides a few simple methods and Pythonic phrases for guiding, searching, and changing a parse tree: a toolkit for studying a document and removing what you need. It doesn’t take much code to document an application.

Lxml – This is a fast, powerful, and easy-to-use parsing library that works with both HTML and XML files. It’s ideal when extracting data from large datasets.

Selenium – It’s an open-source browser automation tool (web driver) that allows you to automate processes such as logging into a social media platform.  It allows developers to control web browsers programmatically, enabling tasks such as web scraping.

1. The final step is to get a good coding environment, such as Visual Studio. 

Python is highly scalable, making it suitable for large-scale web scraping projects and its simplicity and readability make it an ideal choice for developers. If you find this overwhelming, hire Python developers.