Preparing to Scrape

Figure out the purpose of scrapping

Before we can start scraping, we need to figure out what we want to do. We will be using my blog for this example. We can use Python’s urllib2 module to download the HTML that we need to parse or we can use the requests library. For this example, we’ll be using requests.

Most websites nowadays have pretty complex HTML. Fortunately, most browsers provide tools to figure out the complexities of website elements. For example, if we open the blog in chrome, we can right-click on any of the article titles and click the Inspect menu option (see below):