Introduction to Web Scraping

Welcome to the course! Today, we will begin exploring how Web Scraping works. Web Scraping is a process used to automatically extract information from websites. For instance, you can use it to compare prices on various platforms or gather data about stocks.

There are numerous methods in Python for extracting data. Let's compare the most popular libraries for Web Scraping: Requests, Beautiful Soup, lxml, and Selenium.

Throughout this course, our primary focus will be on the first two libraries. However, it's worth noting that Selenium and lxml are incredibly powerful tools:

• Selenium enables JavaScript support, a programming language that allows developers to interact with dynamic fields and menus;
• lxml facilitates working with both HTML and XML files.