Requests and BeautifulSoup are two Python libraries that complement each other beautifully for web scraping purposes. Combining them provides a powerful toolkit for extracting data from websites.

Overview

Requests is a library that allows you to send HTTP requests to web servers and handle things like cookies, authentication, proxies, and timeouts in a user-friendly way.

BeautifulSoup is a library for parsing and extracting information from HTML and XML documents once you've downloaded them using Requests.

Together they provide a robust way to download, parse, and extract information from web pages.

Example Usage

Here's a simple example scraping a web page:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = '<https://example.com>'

# Download page with Requests
response = requests.get(url)
html = response.text

# Parse HTML with BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

# Extract data
h1 = soup.find('h1').text
print(h1)

We use Requests to download the page HTML, then pass that to BeautifulSoup to parse and extract the

tag text.

Advantages

Some key advantages of using Requests and BeautifulSoup together:

Overall this combination is simple but extremely powerful for most web scraping needs.

Limitations

One limitation is that neither library executes JavaScript, so sites heavy in AJAX may require a browser automation tool like Selenium as well.

But for a wide range of web scraping tasks, BeautifulSoup paired with Requests provides an easy yet robust data extraction toolkit.