Python: How to Screen Scrape a Website Using BeautifulSoup (BS4) | Learn with Dr. Todd Wolfe

In this video, the famous Dr. Todd Wolfe will walk you through how to scrape data from a website using Python and the BeautifulSoup (BS4) library. We'll explore the fundamentals of web scraping, showing you step-by-step how to extract the titles of articles from the Hacker News website.

Key Topics Covered in This Video:

Introduction to web scraping and its use cases.
Setting up your Python environment, including installing BeautifulSoup and requests packages.

HTTP requests: How to get the HTML content of a webpage.

Using BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML and navigate through the tags.

Extracting and printing article titles from the Hacker News website, using simple Python loops and techniques.

Tips on scraping ethically and respecting website rules.

Tutorial Objectives:
Learn how to install BeautifulSoup and requests for Python.
Understand how to fetch webpage content using the requests library.
Learn to parse and navigate HTML with BeautifulSoup to find specific elements.
Extract and print article titles from the Hacker News homepage using Python.
Get valuable insights from Dr. Todd Wolfe about best practices in web scraping.

By the end of this video, you'll be able to create your own web scraper to gather useful information from publicly available websites, and you'll gain a solid understanding of how BeautifulSoup can make HTML parsing easy.

Code Snippets Used in This Video: You can find the example code used in this video in the description below, so you can follow along as Dr. Todd Wolfe shows you each step of the process.

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Resources Mentioned in This Video:

BeautifulSoup Documentation: https://www.crummy.com/software/Beaut...
Hacker News Website: https://news.ycombinator.com/
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LinkedIn:   / toddwolfe  

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#Python #WebScraping #BeautifulSoup #DrToddWolfe #HackerNews #LearnPython #ProgrammingTutorial

Code Snippets:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

URL of the website to scrap

url = "https://news.ycombinator.com/"

send an http request to the url

response = requests.get(url)

check if the request is successful
if response.status_code == 200:
parse the hTML content of the page using the beautifulSoup library
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')

Find all story titles

titles = soup.find_all('span', class_='titleline')

print all the articles
print("Top Articles on Hacker News:")

print(response.text)

for idx, title in enumerate(titles):
print(f"{idx+1}. {title.text}")
else:
print(f"Failed to retrieve the page. Status code: {response.status_code}")