Task: Provide an overview of web scraping techniques and tools

Definitions:

• Web scraping: The process of automatically extracting data from websites using software tools or scripts.
• HTML: Hypertext Markup Language, the standard markup language used for creating web pages.
• API: Application Programming Interface, a set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate with each other.

Directions:

1. Understand the website structure and identify the data you want to extract.
2. Choose a web scraping technique:
   1. Manual copying and pasting
   2. Using browser extensions
   3. Writing custom scripts using programming languages like Python, Ruby, or JavaScript
   4. Utilizing web scraping libraries and frameworks
3. If writing custom scripts, select a suitable programming language and library:
   1. Python: BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, Selenium
   2. Ruby: Nokogiri, Mechanize
   3. JavaScript: Puppeteer, Cheerio
4. Inspect the website’s HTML structure using browser developer tools to locate the desired data.
5. Write the necessary code to extract the data, following the chosen library’s documentation.
6. Handle pagination, if required, to scrape data from multiple pages.
7. Respect the website’s terms of service and robots.txt file to avoid legal issues.
8. Store the scraped data in a structured format like CSV, JSON, or a database for further analysis.

User Inputs:

• {{Website URL to scrape}}
• {{Data elements to extract (e.g., product names, prices, etc.)}}