π 2023-04-16 β Session: Implemented robust web scraping with BeautifulSoup
π 20:40β21:05
π·οΈ Labels: Python, Beautifulsoup, Web Scraping, Error Handling, Dataframe
π Project: Dev
β Priority: MEDIUM
Session Goal: The goal of this session was to implement a robust web scraping solution using BeautifulSoup to extract news articles from a specified website and handle potential errors effectively.
Key Activities:
- Developed a Python script using BeautifulSoup and pandas to scrape news articles and store them in a DataFrame.
- Implemented error handling to manage missing data for article titles, sections, authors, and dates by assigning
None
when values are not available. - Used try-except blocks to handle cases where article titles or dates may be missing.
- Integrated conditional checks to avoid errors when accessing attributes in BeautifulSoup.
- Added a column for βhrefβ in the DataFrame and set default values when elements are missing.
- Explored the use of Selenium for scraping dynamically loaded content and discussed legal and ethical considerations.
- Addressed potential gaierror issues by ensuring valid URLs are used in web scraping.
Achievements:
- Successfully created a web scraping script with comprehensive error handling and data integration into a pandas DataFrame.
- Enhanced understanding of handling dynamic content with Selenium.
Pending Tasks:
- Further exploration of Selenium for dynamic content scraping and legal considerations.
- Testing the script on different websites to ensure robustness.