πŸ“… 2024-08-01 β€” Session: Enhanced Web Scraping Scripts for Student Data

πŸ•’ 22:30–23:55
🏷️ Labels: Python, Selenium, Web Scraping, Data Extraction, Beautifulsoup
πŸ“‚ Project: Dev
⭐ Priority: MEDIUM

Session Goal

The goal of this session was to develop and refine Python scripts for web scraping student data using Selenium and BeautifulSoup.

Key Activities

  • Developed a Python script utilizing Selenium and BeautifulSoup to extract student information from web pages, storing data in pandas DataFrames while avoiding duplicates based on URL IDs.
  • Modified Selenium scripts to manage browser sessions and tabs effectively, enhancing error handling to improve script robustness.
  • Implemented changes to handle empty tables and deprecated warnings, optimizing DataFrame concatenation using pd.concat instead of append.
  • Updated scripts to print HTML structures using BeautifulSoup’s prettify method and ensured proper page loading with error handling mechanisms.

Achievements

  • Successfully created and refined multiple scripts for extracting and processing student data from web pages.
  • Improved error handling and session management in Selenium scripts, increasing the stability and reliability of the scraping process.
  • Optimized data handling in pandas, ensuring efficient data manipulation and storage.

Pending Tasks

  • Further testing of scripts in diverse web environments to ensure robustness across different scenarios.
  • Continuous monitoring and adjustment of scripts to accommodate any changes in web page structures or technologies.