What is Web Scraping?

Web Scraping in simple terms means extracting data or information from web. This can be achieved manually or by doing automation. If we try to access data manually it becomes a hectic and a more complex task, hence we use a web scripting tool which helps in getting response without rendering page from browser.

How to achieve Web Scraping?

Web scraping can be achieved by following steps:

Step 1: Inspection of visual

It means that we need to find the URL we want to scrape. Next we do the inspection of the age to find the tags which has the data, which can be scraped. This inspection can be done by simply right clicking on the web page and then clicking on inspection.

Step 2: Finding the data we want to scrape

Search the relevant Data on which some activities can be performed.

Step 3: Importing Required libraries

First install selenium and bs4 libraries if they are not present by just writing pip install bs4.

Step 4: Make request for the page

By using http request we open the URL in our program by making use of following command that is driver. get () and also store the content of the requested page by using driver. page_source

Step 5: Store the data 

After extracting data we are now able to store it in required format.

Difficulties of web scraping

Asynchronization while loading web page:

Due to continuous request from client the page loading creates a problem, because of which we are not able to extract the exact data which is been visualized.

Authentication:

There are websites which provides some sort of hidden security so that snoofing and hacking of data is avoided. For certain websites it is way simpler to make a POST request.

Pattern Detection:

The way we access web page may lead to a certain pattern formation which can alert servers which are using crawlers to identify and blacklist the request coming from same IP.