Semalt: Top 5 Python Web Scraping Libraries

23.05.2018

Semalt: Top 5 Python Web Scraping
Libraries

Python is a high-level programming language. It provides a lot of bene ts 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 exible, scalable and readable. One of their best characteristics is their ef ciency. 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 les. It is available for Python 2.6 and Python 3. A

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23.05.2018

parser is a program used to extract information from XML and HTML les. BeautifulSoup's default parser belongs to
Python's standard library. It is exible, 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 les 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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