Beautiful Soup Tutorial

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use Beautiful Soup 4 to scrape the web in Python to retrieve data in HTML, XML, and other markup languages. In this tutorial, we’ll experiment with scraping web pages from a variety of different websites, including IMDB. We’ll introduce Beautiful Soup 4, Python’s essential tools for efficiently and clearly navigating, searching, and parsing HTML web pages. We’ve attempted to cover nearly all of Beautiful Soup 4’s features in this tutorial. You can combine the various features introduced in this tutorial into a larger program to scrape a variety of meaningful data from the web and use it as input to other subroutines.

Audience

This tutorial is essentially designed to guide you through scraping a web page. The fundamental requirement is to get meaningful data from a large, unorganized dataset. The target audience for this tutorial could be anyone:

• Anyone who wants to know how to scrape the web in Python using BeautifulSoup 4.

• Any data science developer/enthusiast or anyone who wants to use this scraped (meaningful) data with various Python data science libraries to make better decisions.

Prerequisites

While there are no mandatory requirements for this tutorial, having knowledge of any or all of the (super cool) technologies mentioned below would be an added advantage.

• Knowledge of any web-related technologies (e.g., HTML Tutorials, CSS Tutorials, and the Document Object Model).

• Python (because it’s a Python package).

• A developer with scraping knowledge in any language.

• A basic understanding of HTML tree structures.