Whether you’re just starting with scraping or want to explore a more powerful tool, requests-HTML makes it easier and more efficient to pull the data you need. Let’s dive in!

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping refers to the process of extracting data from a webpage. This is done by sending an HTTP request to the webpage, downloading the HTML content, and parsing it to extract the information you need. This data can be anything — from article titles to links to product prices.

In its simplest form, web scraping involves three main steps:

1. Sending an HTTP Request: This is the first step where we ask the website for its content (usually an HTML page).
2. Parsing the HTML: Once we have the HTML content, we need to parse it to extract meaningful data. Read my article on the best PythonHTML parsers.
3. Storing the Data: Finally, we store the extracted data, typically in formats like CSV or JSON, so we can analyze it further.

Why Choose requests-HTML for Web Scraping?

There are many libraries available in Python for web scraping, including requests, BeautifulSoup, and Selenium. So why should you consider using requests-HTML?

Here are some reasons why requests-HTML is a great tool for scraping:

• JavaScript Rendering: Many websites today rely on JavaScript to load their content. Unlike basic HTTP requests that only fetch static HTML, requests-HTML can render JavaScript, allowing you to scrape content that dynamically loads on a page.
• Simple API: The API is very simple and easy to understand. If you’re familiar with requests, you will feel right at home with requests-HTML.
• Built-in Parsing: requests-HTML comes with built-in HTML parsing methods that let you use CSS selectors and XPath expressions to extract specific data from the HTML.

Installing requests-HTML

To get started with requests-HTML, you first need to install it. This can be done using the pip package manager. Open a terminal and type the following command:

pip install requests-html

You may also want to install pandas if you plan to work with large amounts of data:

pip install pandas

Once the installation is complete, you can start using requests-HTML in your Python scripts.

Setting Up the Session

The first thing you need to do when using requests-HTML is to create a session. A session is an object that keeps track of all the requests you make during a session. To create a session, you need to import the HTMLSession class from the requests_html module.

Here’s how you set up a session and send a GET request:

from requests_html import HTMLSession
# Create a session
session = HTMLSession()
# Send a GET request to the URL
url = "https://example.com"
response = session.get(url)

The response object now contains the HTML content of the webpage you requested. You can then parse this content to extract useful information.

Parsing HTML Content

Once you’ve received the HTML content, the next step is to parse it. You can use requests-HTML’s built-in find() method, which allows you to extract elements using CSS selectors. You can also use the xpath() method to extract elements with XPath expressions.

For example, let’s say you want to extract the title of a webpage:

# Find the title element and get the text
title = response.html.find('title', first=True).text
print(title)

In this example, the find() method locates the