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Now that we have this selector, we can start writing our Python code and extracting the information we need. You can simulate that in the browser console from the new window you just opened and by using the JavaScript line: document.querySelectorAll("table tbody tr td.titleColumn a").innerText Using this CSS selector and getting the innerText of each anchor will give us the titles that we need. That’s because all titles are in an anchor inside a table cell with the class “titleColumn”. This is useful as it gives us information about how we can access the data.Īn HTML selector that will give us all of the titles from the page is table tbody tr td.titleColumn a. To start understanding the content’s structure, you should right-click on the first title from the list and then choose “Inspect Element”.īy pressing CTRL+F and searching in the HTML code structure, you will see that there is only one tag on the page. Some of the data will require JavaScript rendering.

įirst, we will get the titles, then we will dive in further by extracting information from each movie’s page. Each website will require minor changes to the code.įor this article, I decided to scrape information about the first ten movies from the top 250 movies list from IMDb.

Keep in mind that each website structures its content differently, so you’ll need to adjust what you learn here when you start scraping on your own. You should choose the website you want to scrape based on your needs. Now that you have everything installed, it’s time to start our scraping project in earnest. These will be necessary if we want to use Selenium to scrape dynamically loaded content.
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The final step it’s to make sure you install Google Chrome and Chrome Driver on your machine. To install them, just run these commands: pip3 install beautifulsoup4 If you have Python installed, you should receive an output like this: Python 3.8.2Īlso, for our web scraper, we will use the Python packages BeautifulSoup (for selecting specific data) and Selenium (for rendering dynamically loaded content). To check if you already have Python installed on your device, run the following command: python3 -v Ubuntu 20.04 and other versions of Linux come with Python 3 pre-installed. To start building your own web scraper, you will first need to have Python installed on your machine.
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If you're ever unsure how to proceed, contact the site owner and ask for consent. Generally speaking, you should always read a website's terms and conditions before scraping to make sure that you're not going against their policies. Unless you have a lawful reason to store that data, it's better to just skip it altogether.

Personal data – if the information you gather can be used to identify a person, then it's considered personal data and for EU citizens, it's protected under the GDPR.

