Learn the structure of HTML. We begin by explaining why web scraping can be a valuable addition to your data science toolbox and then delving into some basics of HTML. We end the chapter by giving a brief introduction on XPath notation, which is used to navigate the elements within HTML code.

Web Scraping Overview

Web-scraping is not nonsense!

HyperText Markup Language

HTML tree wordy navigation

From Tree to HTML

Attributes

Keep it Classy

Finding href

Crash Course in XPath

Where am I?

It's Time to P

A classy span

Introduction to HTML

Leverage XPath syntax to explore scrapy selectors. Both of these concepts will move you towards being able to scrape an HTML document.

XPathology

Counting Elements in the Wild

Body Appendages

Choose DataCamp!

Off the Beaten XPath

Where it's @

Check your Class

Hyper(link) Active

Secret Links

Selector Objects

XPath Chaining

Divvy Up This Exercise

The Source of the Source

Course Class by Inspection

Requesting a Selector

XPaths and Selectors

Learn CSS Locator syntax and begin playing with the idea of chaining together CSS Locators with XPath. We also introduce Response objects, which behave like Selectors but give us extra tools to mobilize our scraping efforts across multiple websites. 

From XPath to CSS

The (X)Path to CSS Locators

Get an "a" in this Course

The CSS Wildcard

CSS Attributes and Text Selection

You've been `href`ed

Top Level Text

All Level Text

Respond Please!

Reveal By Response

Responding with Selectors

Selecting from a Selection

Survey

Titular

Scraping with Children

CSS Locators, Chaining, and Responses

Learn to create web crawlers with scrapy. These scrapy spiders will crawl the web through multiple pages, following links to scrape each of those pages automatically according to the procedures we've learned in the previous chapters.

Your First Spider

Inheriting the Spider

Hurl the URLs

Start Requests

Self Referencing is Classy

Starting with Start Requests

Parse and Crawl

Pen Names

Crawler Time

Capstone

Time to Run

DataCamp Descriptions

Capstone Crawler

The Finale

Spiders

DataCamp webpage HTML

The ability to build tools capable of retrieving and parsing information stored across the internet has been and continues to be valuable in many veins of data science. In this course, you will learn to navigate and parse html code, and build tools to crawl websites automatically. Although our scraping will be conducted using the versatile Python library scrapy, many of the techniques you learn in this course can be applied to other popular Python libraries as well, including BeautifulSoup and Selenium. Upon the completion of this course, you will have a strong mental model of html structure, will be able to build tools to parse html code and access desired information, and create a simple scrapy spiders to crawl the web at scale.

Intermediate Python

Learn to retrieve and parse information from the internet using the Python library scrapy.

Web Scraping with Python

Web Scraping in Python

Python Developer

Counting Elements in the Wild

Web Scraping in Python

Hands-on interactive exercise