In the context of web scraping in Python, slashes and brackets also have specific meanings when used with certain libraries and methods.
For example, in the Requests library, slashes are used in URLs to separate different parts of the URL, such as the domain name, path, and query parameters. For example, in the following URL, the slashes separate the domain name (www.example.com) from the path (/blog) and the query parameters (?page=2):
https://www.example.com/blog?page=2 |
In the context of web scraping with the Beautiful Soup library, brackets are used to specify the HTML tag or attribute that you want to extract from a webpage. For example, to extract all links (<a> tags) from a webpage, you can use the following code:
import requestsfrom bs4 import BeautifulSoupurl = 'https://www.example.com'response = requests.get(url)soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')links = soup.find_all('a')for link in links: print(link.get('href')) |
In this code, soup.find_all('a') finds all <a> tags in the HTML content of the webpage and returns a list of Tag objects. The link.get('href') method extracts the href attribute value of each Tag object, which contains the URL of the link.
Brackets can also be used to specify multiple HTML tags or attributes at once. For example, to extract all links and all paragraphs (<p> tags) from a webpage, you can use the following code:
import requestsfrom bs4 import BeautifulSoupurl = 'https://www.example.com'response = requests.get(url)soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')links_and_paragraphs = soup.find_all(['a', 'p'])for tag in links_and_paragraphs: print(tag) |
In this code, soup.find_all(['a', 'p']) finds all <a> and <p> tags in the HTML content of the webpage and returns a list of Tag objects. The for loop then prints each Tag object.