There are multiple tools and frameworks in Python that can help you scrape a web page. Web scraping can be done with enormous options that can be chosen based on different needs.
Firstly, you have to differentiate between website crawling and website scraping. Web crawling is index the information available on the web page through bots. These bots are popularly known as crawlers.
When you do web scraping, the Python proxies automatically extract the content through bots. These bots are called scrapers.
Popular Web Scraping Tools In Python
Although you will find some of the below tools mentioned pre-installed with Python, the most useful tools have to be installed. Here is the list of common web scraping tools that can be accessed with Python3:
1 – Urllib2
Python module Urllib2 comes with a simple interface and is commonly accessed to fetch URLs using different protocols. You will see the interface in the form of a URL open function. Compared to other available tools and frameworks, you will find Urllib2 already installed with Python.
2 – Requests
You won’t find requests pre-installed with Python. If you wish to do web scraping using Python, then install Requests. You will be able to send HTTP/1.1 requests. The users can add headers and form data.
Moreover, you are allowed to use Python dictionaries to multipart files and parameters. Using requests, the users can get access to the response data similarly. You can use pip to send installing requests.
3 – BeautifulSoup
Parsing library beautiful soup can access various parsers. Python’s standard library includes the default parser of Beautiful Soup. The parser makes a parse tree to extract all the information from HTML.
People commonly use Beautiful Soup as a toolkit to extract information and dissect a document. This toolkit can be used to automate changing outgoing documents into UTF-8 and incoming documents into Unicode.
4 – Lxml
LXML is a parsing library for HTML and XML files. If you are looking for high-speed and performance of the parsing library, choosing Lxml will be an ideal option. LXML comes with various modules. One of the popular modules is etree that uses elements to create elements and structure. Use pip tool to install and using Lxml as a Python package.
5 – Selenium
Nowadays, a lot of websites use JavaScript to provide user-friendly content. For instance, they will wait for the user to spend some time on the website before showing them a pop-up message to sign up. Such websites need a selenium tool that can automate the browser. Python binding includes selenium to control it from the application itself.
6 – MechanicalSoup
People use Mechanical Soup as a Python library to automate the interaction processes with various sites. This library automates the process of sending and stories cookies. Moreover, Mechanical Soup is used to follow redirects, links and submit forms. However, this tool doesn’t do JavaScript. You can install Mechanical Soup using the pip command.
7 – Scrapy
Scrapy is an open-source tool. You can use this web crawling framework to extract information and content for several websites. Scrapy was particularly created for web scraping purposes. You can use Scrapy to manage requests and output pipelines.
Moreover, it allows you to preserve user sessions required to learn about the time different users spend on a website. You can also follow redirects. Scrapy can be installed using pip, Anaconda, or Miniconda command.
Conclusion
We hope now you understand how good Python proxies can improve the web scraping process. You should try installing these tools and frameworks to get the benefits. There are a lot of other tools as well that can be accessed with Python. However, the tools mentioned above will help in the web scraping process.
