Web Scraping is a very simple concept, even to beginners. There are numerous articles and video tutorials on the internet. If you are interested in web scrapping, it will hardly take you to build your own web scraper in just a few minutes. In this blog, we tell you about the essentials of web scrapping.
You will find various videos on the internet showing how to build your very own web scraper in five to eight simple steps. You can easily pick up the skill of web scrapping. However, for more personalized projects you will need to know the concept in depth. Many structures of various websites are complex and can be a little tricky to deal with.
Here are the Five Ws and H of web scraping. Read below to find out more:
You may have heard of them, these are the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and occasionally How? For web scraping, you definitely need to know the How.
A few key questions in the thought process to consider when building a web scraper are as follows:
Why?
This is the most important of all the questions. Experts suggest that if you are looking to find a solution to your problems, it’s best to start with why?Are you looking to collect population data for research purposes on crime statistics? Are you researching e-commerce data to visualize the most successful products in a dashboard? Or are you looking to aggregate data on daily stock prices?
Who?
The next most pertinent question is to figure out who? Once you have gathered your objective or goal, you need to find out who will you scrape out of the data. Also, can be explained as whose website are you looking to scrape?
What?
Ask yourself what you will scrape and often this goes parallelly with who since your decision to scrape will mostly be a combination of what site has the data you need in the most accessible form. Also, it is at this point that you will need to decide on the specific type of data you want.
Where?
The specific web pages and sections that store the data you want constitute the where of the scraping process. This is where you can use any web development experience you have and tools you have used previously. For instance, GoogleChrome Dev Tools, etc.
How?
The actual program code you build and all of the logic responsible for referencing the web elements needed for data extraction constitute the how of the scraping process. This is the most important step in your web scraping process. And it will take up almost 80% of your time in the entire process.
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