When will you need to upload files during web scraping?
Even while doing some research online,
I rarely came across any situations that will require you to do this.
And to be honest, this has almost never been required of me.
But there are one or two situations I could think of where
learning how to do this could come in handy.
Let's talk about those.
This whole need to upload files during scraping can
be divided into two categories.
The first category would be uploading a file to a website or
portal so that it generates more content.
The second is when uploading a file becomes necessary to move on to
the next page or proceed deeper into the website.
Let's take a look at three examples, uploading a file to a
website which then generates a report.
An example of this could be a scientific portal, which generates a certain
report based on the contents of the file you uploaded.
You can then proceed to scrape the generated report.
This would come under the first category.
Uploading your resume or picture during a job
application or a website registration.
Obviously, online job applications won't let you proceed further in
case you don't upload your resume, and there are many sites which
make the display picture mandatory, dating sites for example. This
would come in the second category.
Finally, reverse image search.
There are many sites, including Google's image search, in which you can upload a
picture and search for pictures that are similar to yours.
This is the subject of our demo, so we'll see this
in more detail in the next clip.