![]() Will my scraping activities diminish the value of the original data? (for example, do I plan to repackage the data as-is and perhaps siphon off website traffic from the original source)?.Are there terms of service governing use of the website, and am I following those?.Is it possible the scraping will expose intellectual property I do not own?.Am I making a large number of requests that may overload or damage a server?.Will my scraping activity compromise individual privacy?.Questions I ask myself before beginning a scraping project: The robots.txt file does not address topics such as ethical gathering and usage of the data. ![]() As such, some consider the robots.txt file as a set of recommendations rather than a legally binding document. However, much of the information on websites is considered public information. It's largely there for interacting with search engines (the ultimate web scrapers). Most websites have a robots.txt file associated with the site, indicating which scraping activities are permitted and which are not. There is, thankfully, public information that can guide our morals and our web scrapers. On the note of legality, accessing vast troves of information can be intoxicating, but just because it's possible doesn't mean it should be done. The more "edge cases" (departures from the norm) present, the more complicated the scraping will be.ĭisclaimer: I have zero legal training the following is not intended to be formal legal advice. Identical formatting of the data is not required, but it does make things easier. BeautifulSoup (bs4) makes this easier, but there is no avoiding the individual idiosyncrasies of websites that will require customization. There needs to be a sizable amount of structured data with a regular, repeatable format to justify this effort. It would be much easier to capture structured data through an API, and it would help clarify both the legality and ethics of gathering the data. There is no public API available for the data. My guidelines for what qualifies as a good project are as follows. ![]() Some goals for gathering data are more suited for web scraping than others. What to look for in a web scraping project For more of a look at HTML basics, check out this article. We can access the information in there ("All you need to know…") by calling its tag "pro-tip." How to find and access a tag will be addressed further in this tutorial. All you need to know about html is how tags work For example, here is a pretend tag, called "pro-tip": A tag is a collection of information sandwiched between angle-bracket enclosed labels.
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