Open Source Libraries for Web Scraping

Let’s check out popular open-source libraries and frameworks for web scraping.

10 min readApr 10

We talked about scraping web content in several previous articles. In this article, let’s walk through popular Python libraries and frameworks that cover the end-to-end scraping process.

Getting Started

Web scraping is a powerful tool for collecting data from websites and can be used in various applications, including market research, price comparison, and data analysis.

Python is a popular programming language for web scraping due to its ease of use, powerful libraries, and wide range of applications, making it a popular choice for developers and data scientists alike.

HTTP Client Libraries

A robust and elegant HTTP client library is essential for web scraping. Python comes with built-in and open-source libraries that make it extremely easy to get started.

There are many open-source HTTP clients available. Let’s go through the popular ones.

urllib

urllib is a Python built-in module that provides a collection of functions for working with URLs.

It contains several modules for working with different aspects of URLs such as

urllib.request for opening and reading URLs
urllib.parse for parsing URLs
urllib.error for handling exceptions raised by urllib.request
urllib.robotparser for parsing robots.txt files
urllib.response for working with HTTP responses.

Requests

As per the Python documentation, for a higher-level HTTP client interface, it is recommended to use the Requests package.

Requests is a popular library that simplifies making HTTP requests in Python. It provides a high-level interface for sending HTTP requests, handling cookies, managing authentication, and other features that make HTTP requests extremely easy.

Requests is one of the most downloaded Python packages today, pulling in around 30M downloads / week. According to GitHub…