How to Scrape Data from Ebay Site using Beautiful Soup with the Python Programming, Part 1

The complete code can be accessed on GitHub

Web Scraping is the process of extracting text information from websites or online pages. This is a method for retrieving information and datasets that will be analyzed further. So how to scrape data from website with python?

On this occasion, we will explain how to extract information using Python programming. Then the library needed to scrape data from the eBay site is Beautiful Soup package.

Beautiful Soup is a commonly used library for parsing HTML elements for data scraping. Simply put, this library is used to parse HTML tag elements so we can retrieve the text.

The complete stages of how to scrape data from the eBay site are as follows:

• Define url, param, headers etc. which are obtained by inspecting elements of a website

• Parsing data with the beautiful soup package (to search for CSS)

• Extraction data from the results of previous parsing process using repetition

• Display data in pycharm

• Display dictionary data into a json file (for writing and reading files)

• Convert data to CSV / Excel

This is a data scrape tutorial to search for Samsung cellphones on eBay site.

Open the pycharm application and select new project to create a new project.

Then the next step is create a virtual environment. Adjust to the settings above

This is the appearance of the project that will be created.

The next step is install the request package in pycharm. First access the “request” on the pypi website. Then copy “pip install requests” into the pycharm terminal

Copy “pip install requests” to the terminal in pycharm, then click enter to execute command.

The next step is install the beautifulsoup package in pycharm. Access a beautifulsoup package via the pypi website. Then copy “pip install beautifulsoup4” and paste it into the terminal

Copy “pip install beautifulsoup4” and paste it into the terminal, then press enter.

If everything has been installed, you can check it in the terminal with “pip list” command, as shown above

Then, after finishing installing all packages. The next step is import packages needed to create the program.

This is the website that we will scrape data with Python. In this example, we will search for a Samsung cellphone, then we will scrape the data.

Right click on the website page to inspect elements and retrieve html/css data from website.

The next step is select network tab and select the document type with status 200 (meaning the web can be accessed and data can be scraped). Then click once

On the headers tab, select request url to retrieve url data that we will scrape later.

Copy URL until the symbol “?”

Then paste it in url variable.

Then, go to the payload tab beside headers tab, to retrieve the query string parameters data.

Then paste it into the params variable, until like a code above.

The next step is copy user agent from eBay website. The user agent can be found in headers tab, and scroll to the bottom.

This is the first part about how to parse and scrape data on the eBay website using the Python programming language.

Article source fatadev.com