Semalt: Top 5 Python Web Scraping Libraries
Python is a high-level programming language. It provides a lot of benefits to programmers, developers, and startups. As a webmaster, you can easily develop dynamic websites and applications using Scrapy, Requests and BeautifulSoup and get your work done conveniently. Python libraries are useful for both small and large-sized companies. These libraries are flexible, scalable and readable. One of their best characteristics is their efficiency. All Python libraries feature a lot of awesome data extraction options, and programmers use them to balance their time and resources.
Python is the prior choice of developers, data analysts and scientists. Its most famous libraries have been discussed below.
1. Requests:
It is the Python HTTP library. Requests was released by Apache2 License a few years ago. Its goal is to send multiple HTTP requests in a simple, comprehensive and human-friendly way. Its latest version is 2.18.4, and Requests is used to scrape data from dynamic websites. It is a simple and powerful HTTP library that allows us to access web pages and extract useful information from them.
2. BeautifulSoup:
BeautifulSoup is also known as HTML parser. This Python package is used to parse XML and HTML documents and target non-closed tags in a better way. In addition, BeautifulSoup is capable of creating parse trees and pages. It is mainly used to scrape data from HTML documents and PDF files. It is available for Python 2.6 and Python 3. A parser is a program used to extract information from XML and HTML files. BeautifulSoup's default parser belongs to Python's standard library. It is flexible, useful and powerful and helps accomplish multiple data scraping tasks at a time. One of the major advantages of BeautifulSoup 4 is that it automatically detects HTML codes and allows you to scrape HTML files with special characters. In addition, it is used to navigate through different web pages and build web applications.
3. lxml:
Just like Beautiful Soup, lxml is a famous Python library. Two of its famous versions are libxml2 and libxslt. It is compatible with all Python APIs and helps scrape data from dynamic and complicated sites. Lxml is available in different distribution packages and is suitable for Linux and Mac OS. Unlike other Python libraries, Lxml is a straightforward, accurate and reliable library.
4. Selenium:
Selenium is another Python library that automates web browsers. This portable software-testing framework helps develop different web applications and scrape data from multiple web pages. Selenium provides playback tools for authors and doesn't need you to learn scripting languages. It is a good alternative to C++, Java, Groovy, Perl, PHP, Scala and Ruby. Selenium deploys on Linux, Mac OS and Windows and was released by Apache 2.0. In 2004, Jason Huggins developed Selenium as part of his data scraping project. This Python library is composed of different components and is mainly implemented as a Firefox add-on. It allows you to record, edit and debug web documents.
5. Scrapy:
Scrapy is an open-source Python framework and web crawler. It is originally designed for web crawling tasks and is used to scrape information from websites. It uses APIs to perform its tasks. Scrapy is maintained by Scrapinghub Ltd. Its architecture is built with spiders and self-contained crawlers. It performs a variety of tasks and makes it easy for you to crawl and scrape web pages.
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