Web Scraping Tutorial For Beginners With Scrapy & Python

Web scraping is the process of scraping websites and extracting desired data from the same, and in this course, you’ll learn and master web scraping using python and scrapy framework with a step-by-step and in-depth guide.

A Step-By-Step Guide

Assuming that you don’t know anything about web scraping, web crawling, scrapy framework, web scraping, or even web scrapping meaning –  we will start from the complete basics. In the first section, you’ll learn about the web scraping process step-by-step (with infographics – no code), how to scrape data from websites and how to use scrapy for the same (i.e. scrapy meaning).

After getting the basics clear and having an idea of how web scraping works, we will start web scraping using python & scrapy framework! Again, we’ll move step-by-step and perform each step learned in the basics with bite-sized lessons. We’ll take it slow so that it’s easier for you to understand each and every step involved in scraping and extracting data from websites.

Web Scraping & Scrapy Essentials

Having built an actual web scraper, you’ll get an idea of how web scraping works firsthand. Now it’s crucial to cover the essential concepts of web scraping and scrapy, which we will do next.

• CSS Selectors to select web elements

• XPath to select web elements

• Scrapy Shell to test & verify selectors

• Items to organize extracted data

• Load Items with ItemLoaders with input & output Processors

• Export data to JSON, CSV, XLSX (Excel) & XML file formats

• Save extracted data to online databases like MongoDB using ItemPipelines

Master Web Scraping In-Depth

Learning how to scrape websites and the essentials already makes you a complete web scraper but, we’ll take this even further and learn the advanced web scraping techniques to become an expert!

• Follow links in a webpage to another page

• Crawl multiple pages and extract data i.e. Pagination

• Scrape data using Regular Expressions (RegEx)

• Extract Data From HTML Tables

• Login Into Websites Using Scrapy FormRequest

• Bypass CSRF protected Login forms

• Scrape Dynamic or JavaScript Rendered Websites using Scrapy Playwright

  • Interact with web elements like fill forms, click buttons, etc.

  • Handle Infinite Scroll websites

  • Wait For Elements when contents/data takes time to load

  • Take Screenshot of websites

  • Save websites as PDF

• Identify API calls from websites and scrape data from APIs

• Use middleware in a scrapy project

• Configure settings in a scrapy project

• Use and Rotate User-Agents & Proxies

• Web scraping Best Practices

Real-World Projects

After master web scraping and web crawling, we need projects to get started! That’s why you’ll perform three projects as well:

• Champions League Table [ ESPN ]

• Product Tracker [ Amazon ]

• Scraper Application [ GUI ]

Join us in this in-depth course where you’ll learn about web scraping from scratch and master the process of extracting data from websites step-by-step. Check out the preview lessons to get started and learn how web scraping works! See you there~