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Data & Automation Lesson 3 of 4

Web Scraping & API Consumption with Requests & BeautifulSoup

28:15 Python for Automation & Data Analysis

Extract data from websites that lack public APIs. Parse HTML trees, find data tables, and respect polite scraping etiquette.

Lesson notes

The internet is the world's largest repository of public data. Web scraping empowers you to extract prices, research papers, job listings, and news articles directly into your analysis pipeline.

What you'll learn

  • Sending HTTP requests with headers and error handling
  • Parsing DOM elements using CSS selectors with BeautifulSoup
  • Handling rate limits and robots.txt guidelines

1. Polite Scraping Rules

Always set a custom User-Agent, pause between requests using `time.sleep()`, and never overwhelm server resources.