📅 2023-04-16 — Session: Developed and Debugged Web Scraping Scripts
🕒 19:35–20:15
🏷️ Labels: Python, Web Scraping, Beautifulsoup, Debugging, Automation
📂 Project: Dev
⭐ Priority: MEDIUM
Session Goal:
The session aimed to develop and debug Python scripts for web scraping news articles and extracting relevant data such as station names, URLs, and HTML structures.
Key Activities:
- Addressed GitHub push authentication issues by troubleshooting Git credential setups and command formatting.
- Explored automation techniques for keyword search in news articles using web scraping, NLP, and machine learning.
- Developed Python scripts utilizing BeautifulSoup and Pandas to scrape news sources and extract data into DataFrames.
- Debugged web scraping scripts to fix errors in logo extraction and HTML parsing by checking for specific tags before data extraction.
- Implemented regular expressions to extract domain names from URLs and modified them to exclude prefixes.
- Provided insights into regular expressions, focusing on capturing and non-capturing groups.
- Discussed ethical considerations in web crawling and provided example code for using Scrapy and BeautifulSoup.
- Updated scripts to enhance HTML structure extraction and readability.
Achievements:
- Successfully developed and debugged multiple web scraping scripts.
- Improved understanding of regular expressions and ethical web scraping practices.
Pending Tasks:
- Further exploration of machine learning techniques for keyword automation.
- Continuous improvement of web scraping scripts for efficiency and accuracy.