Which is the Best Web Scraping Tool: Scrapy or BeautifulSoup?

The tools that data science specialists employ are one of the most important assets for data-driven companies. A web crawler and other web scraping tools are only a handful of the technologies that may be used to collect useful information. Web scraping facilitates the extraction of data from a variety of web services and the conversion of unstructured data into a structured whole.

Web scraping may be done with a variety of tools, including lxml, BeautifulSoup, MechanicalSoup, Scrapy, Python Requests, and others. Scrapy and Beautiful Soup are two of the most popular among developers.

Here, in this blog, you will see the comparison of two web scraping tools, and will also understand the difference between them.

Scrapy

Scrapy is a collaborative open-source platform for quickly and easily scraping data from webpages. Data may be extracted utilizing APIs with this program. It's also a general-purpose web crawler. Scrapy is a framework for creating web spiders that explore web pages and retrieve data.

Selectors, a built-in technique for extracting data in the framework, may be used for data mining, automated testing, and other applications. Starting with PyPy 5.9, Scrapy is supported on Python 3.5+, CPython, and CPython.

Features of Scrapy

Scraping with Scrapy

Using pip

Scrapy library may be installed via the python package 'pip' if you merely want to install it globally on your machine. Type the following command into your terminal or command prompt.

pip install scrapy

Using Conda

Simply enter and run the following command in your terminal to install scrapy in your conda system.

conda install – c conda-forge scrapy 

The scrapy shell: is a command-line tool that allows you to scrape web pages interactively.

Scrapy shell may be opened by typing scrapy shell.

Extracting with Scrapy Shell

1. Copy the link from the html file in a web browser.

2. Now type and run the following command in the scrapy shell:

fetch(“url—”)

The fetch command will download the page locally to your machine if you replace url– with the url of the html file or any webpage.

A similar notice will appear on your console.

[scrapy.core.engine] DEBUG: Crawled (200)

3. Viewing the Reply

In a response object, the fetch item will save any page or information it fetched. Simply fill in and input the following command to see the response object.

view(response)

The console will return True, and your default browser will view the webpage that was downloaded using fetch ().

4. Now that you have all of the information you require, you may go on to the next step. All you need to know is what information you require.

5. Scraping the data: Returning to the console, all of the items must be printed behind the previously downloaded webpage. Type the following command in the prompt:

print(response.text)

BeautifulSoup

Beautiful Soup is a popular Python library for parsing HTML or XML texts into a tree structure so that data may be found and extracted. This application makes working with website data straightforward with a simple Pythonic interface and automated encoding conversion.

This library includes easy methods and Pythonic idioms for traversing, finding, and changing a parse tree, as well as automatically converting incoming and outgoing documents to Unicode and UTF-8.

Features of BeautifulSoup

Scraping using BeautifulSoup

PIP may be used to install the Beautiful Soup library with a single command. It's accessible on nearly every platform. Here's how to set it up with Jupyter Notebook.

!pip install BeautifulSoup4 

This library may be imported and assigned to an object using the following code.

Initiating

We'll parse the data using Beautiful Soup using this simple and default HTML doc.

The below script will expand HTML into its hierarchy:

Exploring the Tree

The following commands can be used to travel around the tree:

There are several characteristics in Beautiful Soup that may be viewed and modified. This data can be saved as a text file after it has been extracted and processed.

BeautifulSoup vs. Scrapy

Structure

Beautiful Soup is a Python package targeted for short turnaround tasks like screen scraping, whereas Structure Scrapy is an open-source framework. A framework turns the program's power over to the developer and tells them what they need to know. A library, on the other hand, is called by the developer when and where it is required.

Performance

Scrapy's performance may be claimed to be faster than Beautiful Soup since it has built-in support for creating feed outputs in many formats, as well as choosing and extracting data from various sources. With the aid of the Multithreading process, working with Beautiful Soup may be sped up.

Extensibility

When working on smaller projects, Beautiful Soup works best. While Scrapy is a better alternative for larger, more complicated projects because it can add custom functionality and construct pipelines with flexibility and speed.

Beginner-Friendly

Beautiful Soup is the perfect place to start for a beginner who is trying their hand at web scraping for the first time. Scrapy can be used for scraping, although it's a lot more complicated than BeautifulSoup.

Community

Scrapy has a far larger and more active development community than Beautiful Soup. Developers may also use Beautiful Soup in Scrapy callbacks to parse HTML replies by putting the response's body into a BeautifulSoup object and extracting any data they need.

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