Hi and welcome to this course on scraping your first web page with Python.
In this module, we'll get you started with web scraping.
We'll start our discussion off by understanding how the browser
on your desktop or your mobile phone works.
We'll understand how HTTP works for accessing web content.
HTTP requests are sent to web servers, responses are received from them.
Web scraping involves two phases.
The first phase is to fetch the web content using HTTP,
and once you have the content, you need to parse it and extract information.
We'll focus on fetching web content from a URL using
different HTTP libraries in Python.
We'll explore a few different libraries here such as requests,
httplib, and urllib, and we'll see how we can choose amongst these.
We'll then move on to hands-on demos using all of these client libraries.
We'll see how you can perform GET, PUT and POST requests,
and parse their responses.
Once we've completed the basic requests and responses,
we'll understand what URL redirects are and how you
can handle them in your code.