There are several Python libraries and frameworks to extract data from the web.
Beautiful Soup
Starting off the list with the best web scraping library for beginners: Beautiful Soup.
The “beauty” of Beautiful Soup lies in its simplicity.
It’s easy to set up and you canget started with your first web scraping projectwithin minutes.
Beautiful Soup uses a hierarchical approach to extracting data from an HTML document.
Expecting more from Beautiful Soup would be taking it too far, though.
There’s no built-in support for middlewares and other advanced functionalities such as proxy rotation or multi-threading.
2. requests
requests is undoubtedly the most used Python library for handling HTTP requests.
The tool stands up to its tagline: HTTP for HumansTM.
It supports multiple HTTP request types, ranging from GET and POST to PATCH and DELETE.
If that sounds easy, rest assured as requests also caters to advanced users with its multitude of features.
Scrapy
As the name suggests, Scrapy is a Python framework for developing large-scale web scrapers.
It’s the swiss-army-knife to extract data from the web.
Scrapy handles everything from sending requests and implementing proxies to data extraction and export.
Unlike Beautiful Soup, the true power of Scrapy is its sophisticated mechanism.
But don’t let that complexity intimidate you.
It comes with selectors that let you select data from an HTML document using XPath or CSS elements.
An added advantage is the speed at which Scrapy sends requests and extracts the data.
It sends and processes requests asynchronously, and this is what sets it apart from other web scraping tools.
Scrapy’s workflow is segregated into multiple files and for beginners, that might come off as unsolicited complexity.
Selenium
If you’re looking to scrape dynamic, JavaScript-rendered content, then Selenium is what you need.
Selenium spawns a net web client instance using the web driver and loads the page.
But given the additional features Selenium brings to the table, it’s completely justified.
It lets you handle and process URLs in your Python scripts.
An apt practical system of urllib is URL modification.
It’s recommended that you follow a website’s robots.txt and only scrape the pages that are allowed.
Is this a cheap Beautiful Soup ripoff?
you could consider it halfway between Beautiful Soup and Selenium.
It doesn’t handle JavaScript.
While the names are similar, MechanicalSoup’s syntax and workflow are extremely different.
Another impressive feature of MechanicalSoup is that it lets you fill out forms using a script.
For example, no built-in method to handle data output, proxy rotation, and JavaScript rendering.
The most prominent issue people face when coding a scraper is learning HTML document hierarchy.
