Scraping the web

Now that we've familiarized ourselves with the ways Python works, we have a little bit of a foundation to build from. Nearly everything else we do today is going to be using the fundamentals from the intro to varying degrees and in different combinations to create longer scripts.

So let's scrape a web page. We want to collect all the data from the main table on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's list of domestic power reactor units.

Python comes with a library installed that's designed specifically for reading and writing CSV files (csv), but we're also going to need to extend Python's functionality a bit by bringing in two other libraries.

One is requests -- it handles the job of playing a web browser that can fetch a web page and send back the underlying HTML. The other is BeautifulSoup, which parses the HTML into what amounts to a series of lists that we can then search, navigate and extract data from.

When we get to part two, we'll use the built-in regular expressions library re to isolate some text from the detail pages and time to keep us from swamping a government site with too many requests at once.

A big thank you to Anthony DeBarros for allowing us to present a modified version of his web scraping example from python-get-started.

We'll use the following files:

  • scrape.py: The file we'll use to write our scraping script, following the comments.

  • scrape_pt2.py: The file we'll use to push our scraping script further; it contains finished code for scrape.py and open spots to add code that loops through to detail pages and collects additional information.

  • nrc_backup.html: A backup version of the main table we want to scrape in case there's a connection problem.

  • table_example.html: A bare bones HTML table that shows the basic tags and how they're nested, with the flourishes of a modern web page stripped away -- it's ugly.

  • fun_with_bs.py: A primer for some of BeautifulSoup's most relevant commands for navigating HTML.

  • fun_with_csv.py: A brief example of how Python uses its standard csv library to read and write delimited-text files.

  • fun_with_regex.py: A file that covers some regular expresses in Python for finding and isolating text.

Finished versions will appear in the completed folder.