Extracting Data from HTML with BeautifulSoup

This course covers the important aspects of scraping websites using Beautiful Soup. You will learn to build, manipulate and traverse the parse tree, as well as to leverage advanced features such as working with filters, CSS and XPath.

Web scraping is an important technique that is widely used as the first step in many workflows in data mining, information retrieval, and text-based machine learning. In this course, Extracting Data from HTML with BeautifulSoup* you will gain the ability to build robust, maintainable web scraping solutions using the Beautiful Soup library in Python. First, you will learn how regular expressions can be used to scrape web content, and how Beautiful Soup does better in important ways. Next, you will discover how Beautiful Soup parses HTML from web content, fixes up badly-formed tags, and builds a clean, easily traversable parse tree. You will then see how that parse tree can be used in order to find and retrieve specific patterns. Finally, you will round out your knowledge by leveraging advanced features of beautiful soup such as working with CSS and XPath. When you’re finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge to implement robust web scraping using Beautiful Soup.