Stories from the Web Crawling trenches in parsing

The Complete BeautifulSoup Cheatsheet with Examples

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 4, 2023

This cheatsheet covers the full BeautifulSoup 4 API with practical examples. It provides a comprehensive guide to web scraping and HTML parsing using Python's BeautifulSoup library.

Parsing JSON Responses from APIs in Python Requests

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 3, 2024

When working with APIs in Python, use response.json() to parse JSON data. Handle invalid JSON gracefully and check status codes and Content-Type before parsing.

The Ultimate Nokogiri Cheat Sheet for Ruby

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 31, 2023

Nokogiri is a powerful HTML/XML parsing and scraping library for Ruby. This cheat sheet covers its extensive capabilities.

The Ultimate Loofah Cheatsheet for Ruby

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Nov 4, 2023

Loofah is a Ruby library for parsing and manipulating HTML/XML documents. It provides a simple API for traversing, manipulating, and extracting data from markup. It also offers XSS sanitization and integrates with Rails. Loofah is built on top of Nokogiri, providing speed and Ruby idioms.

A Guide to Using XPath with BeautifulSoup for Powerful Web Scraping

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

XPath is a powerful querying language for selecting elements in XML and HTML documents, making web scraping with BeautifulSoup more robust and flexible.

Retrieving and Parsing Text from URLs with Python's urllib

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 8, 2024

The urllib module in Python provides tools for retrieving and parsing content from URLs. It can fetch text content, parse HTML and JSON, and handle errors.

The Ultimate Floki Cheatsheet for Elixir

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 31, 2023

Floki makes it easy to parse and query HTML documents in Elixir using CSS selectors and tree traversal.

The Complete Python HTML Parser Cheatsheet

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Jan 9, 2024

The Python HTML parser allows you to parse HTML and XML documents and extract data. This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to use the parser effectively.

Introduction to Web Scraping with BeautifulSoup

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites through an automated procedure. Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed specifically for web scraping purposes. It provides parsing and navigation tools for extracting data from HTML and XML documents.

The Ultimate Rvest Cheatsheet in R

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 31, 2023

rvest is a package in R for web scraping and data extraction from HTML using CSS selectors. It also provides functions for parsing and navigating HTML documents. Additional features include handling issues, advanced usage with RSelenium, best practices, troubleshooting, and tips and tricks. The package is useful for scraping websites ethically and efficiently, processing extracted data, and handling large datasets.

Formatting HTML with BeautifulSoup's prettify()

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

The prettify() method in BeautifulSoup is used for formatting and printing HTML in a more readable way, making it easier to debug and visually inspect during web scraping.

The Ultimate HTML::Parser Perl Cheat Sheet

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 31, 2023

HTML::Parser is a Perl module for parsing HTML/XML documents and extracting/manipulating their content.

The Ultimate HTML::TreeBuilder Cheatsheet in Perl

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 31, 2023

HTML::TreeBuilder is a Perl module for parsing and manipulating HTML and XML documents into a tree structure.

Reading CSV Files with Python's urllib

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 8, 2024

CSV files can be easily downloaded and parsed using Python's urllib module. It is useful for data analysis, data integration, and streaming large CSV files.

Finding Headers in BeautifulSoup

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

When parsing HTML and XML documents, accessing and working with headers is a common task. Understanding header tags in BeautifulSoup is important for efficient parsing and processing of documents.

A Comprehensive Guide to Searching with CSS Selectors and Attributes in BeautifulSoup

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

The BeautifulSoup library provides powerful techniques for searching and extracting data from HTML and XML documents using CSS selectors. Mastering these techniques will enhance web scraping and parsing capabilities.

What is the difference between Python ElementTree and BeautifulSoup?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

ElementTree is best for working with valid XML documents, while BeautifulSoup is designed for parsing potentially malformed real-world HTML.

Loading HTML Files into BeautifulSoup for Web Scraping

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

BeautifulSoup makes it straightforward to load HTML for parsing and extraction. Use Python's built-in html.parser or choose others like lxml or html5lib. Selenium may be needed for dynamic pages.

The Ultimate Gumbo C++ Cheatsheet

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 31, 2023

Gumbo is an HTML5 parsing library in C++ that allows for easy manipulation and extraction of HTML. It provides various functions for selecting, traversing, and manipulating nodes in the DOM.

CSS Selectors vs XPath with BeautifulSoup: How to Choose the Right Selector

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

CSS selectors and XPath expressions are powerful techniques for parsing and extracting data from HTML and XML. CSS selectors offer simplicity and readability, while XPath provides unmatched query power and flexibility. Combining both can give you a robust toolkit for efficient data extraction.

URL Parsing in Python with urllib.parse

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 6, 2024

Understanding and manipulating URLs is crucial for Python web programming. The urllib.parse module provides functions for parsing, composing, and manipulating URLs in Python.

Can BeautifulSoup use XPath?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

BeautifulSoup and XPath can complement each other to create powerful web scrapers, but be mindful of the performance tradeoff.

What are the limitations of BeautifulSoup?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

BeautifulSoup is a Python library for parsing and extracting data from HTML and XML documents. It struggles with modern JavaScript sites and cannot bypass most bot protections. CSS selectors and navigation logic can get complex. Consider alternatives like Scrapy, Puppeteer, or Playwright for professional web scraping.

How to Add Comments in JSON

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 4, 2023

JSON is a lightweight data format without native comment support. Use YAML or XML for commenting. JSONC is an emerging standard for comments in JSON.

Can BeautifulSoup parse XML?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

Beautiful Soup is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It can parse XML documents with some limitations. For more advanced XML capabilities, consider using Python's built-in XML libraries or third-party libraries like lxml.

Is BeautifulSoup open-source?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

BeautifulSoup is an open-source Python library for web scraping and parsing HTML and XML documents. It is released under a permissive BSD license and depends on other open-source libraries with MIT licenses. This permissive licensing structure allows for commercial usage and has contributed to BeautifulSoup's popularity.

Getting Data out of URLs in 5 Easy Steps in Python

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 20, 2024

URLs contain structured data. Learn how to parse, extract query parameters, validate hostnames, extract path components, and reconstruct URLs efficiently.

A Guide to BeautifulSoup's CSS Selector Capabilities

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

The BeautifulSoup library supports searching and extracting elements from HTML and XML documents using CSS selectors, making it a powerful tool for web scraping.

Who wrote BeautifulSoup?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

The Origins of BeautifulSoup: Mark Pilgrim's Powerful Web Scraping Library. Created in 2004, BeautifulSoup is a popular and powerful library for web scraping and handling HTML/XML in Python.

Scraping Wikipedia With Ruby

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Dec 6, 2023

Wikipedia web scraping using Ruby's Nokogiri library to extract structured data from HTML tables.

How To Use BeautifulSoup's find_all() Method

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

The find_all() method in BeautifulSoup is used to find all tags or strings matching a given criteria in an HTML/XML document. It returns a list of all matching tags and strings. It can search by string, regex, or function. It can also search within a specific tag and filter matches by attribute values. Mastering find_all() is key to effective web scraping with BeautifulSoup.

Scraping Reddit Posts in Perl

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Jan 9, 2024

Scraping Reddit using Perl to extract information from posts by parsing HTML and using UserAgent for data extraction.

The Ultimate NSXMLParser Cheatsheet

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 31, 2023

NSXMLParser allows parsing XML documents in Objective-C. It provides SAX style event-driven parsing.

Scraping Yelp Business Listings in Kotlin

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Dec 6, 2023

Yelp data extraction using Kotlin for scraping key data points from listings in San Francisco.

Scrapy vs BeautifulSoup: How to Choose the Right Web Scraping Tool

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

Scrapy and BeautifulSoup are popular Python tools for web scraping. Scrapy is optimized for large-scale crawling and structured data extraction, while BeautifulSoup is better for targeted data extraction from specific pages. Combining both libraries can leverage their respective strengths.

The Ultimate HTMLParser Cheatsheet

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 31, 2023

HTMLParser is an Objective-C wrapper for libxml2 that allows parsing HTML documents. It provides an event-driven interface like NSXMLParser.

urllib read

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 8, 2024

The urllib module in Python provides functionality for retrieving data from URLs. It allows you to fetch web pages, decode and parse HTML, and handle errors. Practical examples include web scraping and checking broken links.

Importing BeautifulSoup in Python

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

The first step in any BeautifulSoup web scraping script is importing the module and initializing the soup object to parse the HTML content.

Is BeautifulSoup a library or module?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

BeautifulSoup is a library in Python for parsing, navigating, and searching HTML and XML documents.

Why is it called BeautifulSoup?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

BeautifulSoup is a popular Python library for web scraping and parsing HTML and XML documents, bringing structure to messy markup.

What is BeautifulSoup 4?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites using Python's BeautifulSoup library, which provides methods to parse and search HTML and XML documents. It is popular due to its simplicity and extensive features.

Parsing XML with BeautifulSoup

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Oct 6, 2023

BeautifulSoup can parse and extract data from XML and HTML documents, making it useful for scraping and analyzing data. It can navigate and search the parsed tree, modify the tree, and output the modified XML. It can also convert a BeautifulSoup XML object back into a string and perform additional processing. Examples demonstrate parsing XML files, displaying extracted data in tables using Pandas, and saving extracted data to CSV files.

Is BeautifulSoup lxml or HTML?

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Feb 5, 2024

BeautifulSoup is a popular Python library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It doesn't parse documents itself, but uses other parsers like lxml and html.parser. It provides methods for navigating, searching, and modifying parsed document trees.

BeautifulSoup vs Scrapy: A Web Scraper's Experience-Based Comparison

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Jan 9, 2024

Web scraping with BeautifulSoup and Scrapy: parsing vs crawling, JavaScript rendering, and data extraction. Combine tools for successful scraping.

Guide to Scraping Reddit Posts in Objective C

Author: Mohan Ganesan

Date: Jan 9, 2024

Parsing through an unfamiliar code base can be intimidating for beginner programmers. In this article, we'll walk step-by-step through a sample program that scrapes posts from Reddit using HTML parsing and XPath selectors.

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