Implemented robust web scraping with error handling

📅 2023-04-16 — Session: Implemented robust web scraping with error handling

🕒 20:40–21:05
🏷️ Labels: Web Scraping, Python, Beautifulsoup, Error Handling, Selenium
📂 Project: Dev
⭐ Priority: MEDIUM

Session Goal:

The session aimed to develop a robust web scraping script using Python, BeautifulSoup, and Pandas, focusing on error handling and dynamic content extraction.

Key Activities:

• Implemented a Python script using BeautifulSoup to scrape news articles from a specified website and store the data in a Pandas DataFrame.
• Enhanced the script with error handling to manage missing data for article titles, sections, authors, and dates by assigning None when values are not available.
• Utilized try-except blocks to handle cases where article titles or dates may be missing.
• Added conditional checks to avoid errors when accessing missing elements, specifically setting the href value to ‘No href’ when the anchor tag is absent.
• Integrated DataFrame to include an ‘href’ column in the resulting data.
• Explored the use of Selenium for scraping dynamically loaded content, acknowledging the limitations of BeautifulSoup for such tasks and emphasizing legal and ethical considerations.
• Provided guidance on resolving the gaierror encountered when connecting to non-existent URLs.

Achievements:

• Successfully developed a web scraping script with comprehensive error handling mechanisms.
• Identified and addressed limitations in scraping dynamically loaded content.

Pending Tasks:

• Explore further optimization of the scraping process for performance improvements.
• Investigate additional legal and ethical guidelines for web scraping.