How to do Web scraping using Selenium and Python?

Web scraping is used as a component of applications for web indexing, data mining, and product review scrapping. Web scraping is also known as a method of gathering a large amount of raw data from various websites and storing them as structured data.

Selenium certification is an automation web framework for testing web applications. It is also very useful for web scraping. Furthermore, Python is also useful for web scrapping. Beautiful Soup is a package in Python that helps in web scrapping.

Web scraping using Selenium and Beautiful soup

There are some libraries useful for web scraping. Such as Selenium online training, Beautiful Soup, pandas, etc. At first, we need to make sure, that all the required libraries are installed. Moreover, we also require Chrome-browser and an Ubuntu OS. Here, we will follow some steps to work out the web scraping process. Beautiful soup is a package in Python library to pull data from HTML and XML files. 

First, we need a URL that we are going to scrap. Later, we need to inspect the page. Here we inspect the page to find the tag where we want to scrape is nested. 

Next, we have to find the data for extraction such as name, price, rating, etc. in case of any online shopping site. 

In the following step, we need to write the code. Here, it needs to create a file in Python and give it a name. Write all codes in that file. Furthermore, we will gather all libraries.

from selenium online training import webdriver

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

import pandas as pd

Here we will configure the web driver to use the Chrome browser. Here we use the command

driver = web driver.Chrome("/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromedriver")

Further, we will open the URL, which we want to scrape. 

After writing the code and opening the URL, we have to extract the data from the said website. Always, the data for extraction is nested in <div> tags. So, we need to find out such tags and extract data from there and store them in variables. Suppose we are using an online shopping site to scrape it, then we can use these tags. These tags are taken for example purpose only. :-

content = driver.page_source

soup = BeautifulSoup(content)

for a in soup.findAll('a',href=True, attrs={'class':'_31qSD5'}):

name=a.find('div', attrs={'class':'_3wU53n'})

price=a.find('div', attrs={'class':'_1vC4OE _2rQ-NK'})

rating=a.find('div', attrs={'class':'hGSR34 _2beYZw'})

products.append(name.text)

prices.append(price.text)

ratings.append(rating.text)

Later we have to run the code written earlier and extract the data from the website. After extracting the data, it should be stored in a suitable format. Next, we have to run the whole code to get the exact results. 

So the above experiment is about web scraping using Python and other libraries. It is useful because it has a large number of libraries. It is easy to use and has great community support. It uses small codes that can be understood easily. 

Similarly, web scraping can be done using Selenium also. We will look into this now.

Here also we require some packages and drivers to run the scraping project.

At first, we need Selenium Package, Chrome Driver, Python 2.x or 3.x or Virtualenv can also be used. Next, we will create a file setup.py. 

Now, we have to import the required modules as we have done in the above example. Here also we have to write some code and extract data that we want to scrape. At last, we will run the code for the test. 

Both the processes are almost the same as the libraries and other things we use here. 

Use of Web Scraping

Web scraping is useful for various purposes. It is used for comparing prices, to gather email address, to scrape social media pages, job listings, and so on. Here Selenium is useful because it allows the user to take a screenshot of the browser that it renders while scraping a website. We can store it to see how the website or browser looks when it is scraping. 

Selenium is useful because it helps to automate the browser. It allows data extraction quickly to get different insights into any website. It makes possible to keep tracking the brand reputation of the company.  Python is also useful because it is easy to use and contains less coding with small scripts. 

Web scraping importance

Web scraping is an integral process that allows gathering data from different sources in the form of news. And store them in a suitable format. It is mostly useful for e-commerce companies where there are several competitors in the world. To gather the relevant data and to get insights from it, web scraping is used. It will help to improve the business using various strategies. 

The process automates the data extraction in a useful format and stores them for future use. Moreover, with the help of web scraping only we can extract huge data and use the insights well. The data can be stored using the CSV format. Furthermore, it helps retrieve, analyze and use the data whenever we want. 

Web scraping business ideas

Web scraping can be applicable to different sectors. Such as Retail and marketing, financial research, Data Science, sales, risk management, etc. In retail management, it is useful for monitoring the price of the competitors, consumer sentiments, product descriptions and price listings, etc. Under financial research, web scraping can be used for extracting the latest business news, extracting financial statements, gathering market data, etc. It is useful in Data Science to get, real-time analysis, predictive analysis, and natural language processing, etc. 

In the products and marketing sector, it is more useful. Such as getting data from content marketing, lead generation, competitive analysis, etc. Furthermore, it is also useful for many other sectors like insurance, sales, etc. It should be managed carefully while its application to avoid any unnecessary issues. 

Other sectors that use web scraping are academics, employment, journalism, classified sites, etc. They use it to get the competitive advantage of the information over their competitors such as for more selenium online training Hyderabad. 

Scope of Web scraping

Web scraping is a platform to capture data from different sources to use it for business development. There is huge data available on the internet but every data is not relevant or useful. To retrieve competitive data, first, it needs to understand the data requirement and the kind of issues that may help. Knowing this one can retrieve data from any source easily. 

It is very helpful in the current scenario. Due to heavy competition in every sector, it becomes very tough to stand out in the market as a topper. So, the web scraping process can be helpful in this regard. It is useful to scrape relevant and best data from the crowd. It will help to retain the brand value of the business. Furthermore, it improvises brand solutions and also helps in lead generation activities. To scrape any website it requires some package installations along with browser support. These will help to work out the process successfully. 

Thus, the above writings explain how to do Web scraping using Selenium and Python and its different aspects. It gives an overview of the selenium with java online training usage of these tools and technology to scrape any website to retrieve useful data. It helps the business to get a more competitive advantage in the market over others. 

To gain more knowledge in this field one can opt for Selenium Online Training from various online sources. This learning will help to enhance skills as well as to develop a successful career in this regard.