Hi, and welcome to this course on Extracting Data from HTML with Beautiful Soup.
In this module,
we will see other techniques that you can use to
parse HTML content from a web page,
and then we'll get started with Beautiful Soup,
which makes things a lot easier.
We'll start this module off with a discussion of what exactly
web scraping is and how it can be useful.
Web scraping is an automated way to extract content from the web,
and it involves two phases.
The first of these is to fetch the web content via
an HTTP request to a target URL.
Once you have the web content available to you within a program,
the next step is to parse this web content.
Now web content parsing can be performed using regular expressions.
But they tend to be fragile and hard to use.
We'll see how we can parse HTML using regular expressions.
We'll see that Beautiful Soup understands the inherent HTML
hierarchical structure and makes things much easier when
you're extracting content from HTML.
Beautiful Soup sets up a parse tree and allows you to navigate
directly to elements within that parse tree.