Web scraping is the process of automatically extracting data from websites, and Python has been the go-to language for data extraction for years, boasting a large community of developers as well as a wide range of web scraping tools to help scrapers extract almost any data from any website.
Today we will explore some of the best libraries and frameworks available for web scraping in Python and provide code examples of how to use them in different web scraping scenarios.
In this Python web scraping tutorial, you’ll learn how to:
But before we start with the tutorial, let's take a quick peek at this summary table. It gives an overview of all the Python web scraping libraries we'll cover in this article. This table will help you navigate the content and provide you with an easy way to remember the topics covered.
| 📚 Library | 💡Features | ⚡️Performance | 👨💻 User-friendliness | 👥 Community | ⭐️ GitHub Stars | 📥 Installation Command |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| https://apify.notion.site/Python-web-scraping-tutorial-Revamp-9e673b87097e4ab78497f0a60cb86a25 | • HTTP(S) Proxy Support | |||||
| • Connection Timeouts | ||||||
| • Chunked Requests | Moderate | Beginner friendly | Well-established, strong community | 51.3k | pip install requests | |
| https://apify.notion.site/Python-web-scraping-tutorial-Revamp-9e673b87097e4ab78497f0a60cb86a25 | • Requests-compatible API | |||||
| • Integrated command-line client | ||||||
| • Supports synchronous and asynchronous requests | ||||||
| Fast | Intermediate | New, growing community | 6.8k | pip install httpx | ||
| https://apify.notion.site/Python-web-scraping-tutorial-Revamp-9e673b87097e4ab78497f0a60cb86a25 | • Intuitive syntax | |||||
| • Efficient DOM parsing, manipulation, and rendering | ||||||
| • Parse nearly any HTML or XML document | ||||||
| Moderate/Limited scalability | Beginner friendly | Well-established, strong community | n/a | pip install beautifulsoup4 | ||
| https://apify.notion.site/Python-web-scraping-tutorial-Revamp-9e673b87097e4ab78497f0a60cb86a25 | • Fast XML/HTML processing | |||||
| • Full feature set for XML, XPath, XSL | ||||||
| • Compatible with ElementTree API | ||||||
| Fast | Intermediate | Well-established, medium-sized community | 2.6k | pip install lxml | ||
| https://apify.notion.site/Python-web-scraping-tutorial-Revamp-9e673b87097e4ab78497f0a60cb86a25 | • jQuery-like syntax for DOM manipulation | |||||
| • Parses HTML documents | ||||||
| Moderate | **Beginner-friendly (for devs with a jQuery background) | Small, niche community | 2.3k | pip install pyquery | ||
| https://apify.notion.site/Python-web-scraping-tutorial-Revamp-9e673b87097e4ab78497f0a60cb86a25 | • Automates web browsers | |||||
| • Supports multiple browsers and OS | ||||||
| • Handles JavaScript-generated content for scraping dynamic pages | ||||||
| Slow/Resource-intensive | Intermediate/Advanced | Well-established, strong community | 29.2k | pip install selenium | ||
| https://apify.notion.site/Python-web-scraping-tutorial-Revamp-9e673b87097e4ab78497f0a60cb86a25 | • Supports multiple browsers | |||||
| • Handles JavaScript-generated content for scraping dynamic pages | ||||||
| • Synchronous and asynchronous APIs | ||||||
| Slow/Resource-intensive | Intermediate/Advanced | Fast-growing, strong community | 61.3k | pip install playwright | ||
| https://apify.notion.site/Python-web-scraping-tutorial-Revamp-9e673b87097e4ab78497f0a60cb86a25 | • Fast data extraction and website crawling | |||||
| • Asynchronous requests | ||||||
| • Scraping, processing, exporting data tools | ||||||
| Very Fast/ Highly scalable | Advanced | Well-established, strong community | 50.7k | pip install scrapy |
Before diving into web scraping with Python, we need to make sure our development environment is ready. To set up your machine for web scraping, you need to install Python, choose an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and understand the basics of how to install the Python libraries necessary for efficiently extracting data from the web.