Scrape the Web – Python and Beautiful Soup Bootcamp

Scrapy is a free and open–source web crawling framework, written in Python. Scrapy is useful for web scraping and extracting structured data which can be used for a wide range of useful applications, like data mining, information processing or historical archival. This Python Scrapy tutorial covers the fundamentals of Scrapy.

Web scraping is a technique for gathering data or information on web pages. You could revisit your favorite website every time it updates for new information, or you could write a web scraper to have it do it for you!

Web crawling is usually the very first step of data research. Whether you are looking to obtain data from a website, track changes on the internet, or use a website API, web crawlers are a great way to get the data you need.

A web crawler, also known as a web spider, is an application able to scan the World Wide Web and extract information in an automatic manner. While they have many components, web crawlers fundamentally use a simple process: download the raw data, process and extract it, and, if desired, store the data in a file or database. There are many ways to do this, and many languages you can build your web crawler or spider in.