Writing a Web Scraper with BeautifulSoup and Requests

Web scraping is one of the most practical Python skills for collecting data from websites. Whether you’re building a research tool, price tracker, or data-driven app, Python makes it easy with libraries like requests and BeautifulSoup.

This beginner-friendly guide walks you through the basics of building your first web scraper.

What Is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of automatically extracting information from websites. Python is widely used for this task due to its simple syntax and rich ecosystem of libraries.

Why Use requests and BeautifulSoup?

• requests handles HTTP requests to fetch webpage content
  
• BeautifulSoup parses HTML and makes it easy to extract the data you want
  
• Lightweight and beginner-friendly
  
• Works well for static websites
  

Installing the Required Libraries

Before you start, install the libraries using pip:

bash

Copy code

pip install requests beautifulsoup4

Step-by-Step: Building a Simple Scraper

Let’s say you want to scrape the titles of blog posts from a webpage.

python

Copy code

import requests

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# Step 1: Make the HTTP request

url = ‘https://example.com/blog’

response = requests.get(url)

# Step 2: Parse the HTML content

soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, ‘html.parser’)

# Step 3: Find the elements you want

titles = soup.find_all(‘h2′, class_=’post-title’)

# Step 4: Print the results

for title in titles:

    print(title.text.strip())

This script fetches the page, finds all <h2> tags with the class post-title, and prints the text content.

Handling Errors and Edge Cases

• Check for response status:
  

python

Copy code

if response.status_code == 200:

    # process data

else:

    print(“Failed to retrieve the page”)

• Add headers to mimic a browser:
  

python

Copy code

headers = {‘User-Agent’: ‘Mozilla/5.0’}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

• Use .get_text() to extract clean content from tags
  

Best Practices

• Be respectful: Don’t overload a website with requests
  
• Check robots.txt to see if scraping is allowed
  
• Avoid scraping behind logins or paywalls unless authorized
  
• Use delays or rate-limiting to avoid getting blocked
  

Practice Challenge

Try scraping the product names and prices from a mock e-commerce page.
Use requests to fetch the page and BeautifulSoup to find elements like:

html

Copy code

<div class=”product-name”>Item 1</div>

<div class=”price”>$10</div>

Level Up Your Skills

Web scraping is a gateway to real-world data projects. Once you’re comfortable with BeautifulSoup, you can explore:

• Pagination
  
• Exporting data to CSV or JSON
  
• Scraping dynamic websites with Selenium or Playwright
  

🎯 Learn how to build full scraping projects with guidance and mentorship at
👉 https://www.thefullstack.co.in/courses/

You might be like this:-

What is AWS Lambda?A Beginner’s Guide to Serverless Computing in 2025

Java vs. Kotlin: Which One Should You Learn for Backend Development?

Where to Find Your Salesforce Organization ID

How Salesforce Stands Out from Other CRMs