What is Scraping?

In this lesson, an introduction to scraping is provided.

We'll cover the following

Scraping?

The extraction of data from a website is known as scraping. A scraper makes a request to a web page for access either using the HTTP protocol or through a browser. The following steps are performed in receiving data from a web page.

  • The scraper makes a GET request to a web page.

  • In response, the structure of the web page, which contains all information in the HTML DOM structure is returned.

  • The scraper then parses the HTML structure to find the information that is required.

  • The information is then fetched and stored.

Any kind of data can be scraped from a web page, whether it be a text, video, audio, or image.

How is it done?

The main part of scraping is to fetch the data from the HTML DOM structure after receiving the response from the web site. The request and response part can easily be done using built-in tools, but the efficient retrieving of data depends on the skill of the programmer.

Web scraping can be thought of like a spider crawling over each and every corner of an HTML structure and retrieving information when needed.


In the next lesson, the tool used for scraping is discussed.