Web scrapping in Python - Best Python web scraping libraries
Are you getting started to web data extraction? In this article, you'll find the most popular web scraping libraries in Python to help you get the job done easily.
What are Python web scraping libraries?
Web scraping libraries in Python are tools that will help you go beyond the challenges you'll be presented with, from performing HTTP requests to dealing with webpages that use JavaScript to display content without reloading the page (and even the whole page could be generated by some JavaScript framework, like React).
A decent Python web scraping library should be quick, scalable, and capable of extracting data from any sort of online resource. So get ready to see our list of favorite tools for data extraction purposes designed to accompany you along the way. These tools are ZenRows, Requests, BeautifulSoup, Selenium, Pyppeteer, Playwright, Scrapy and urllib3.
Top libraries used in Python for web scraping
1. ZenRows
ZenRows package is an API that solves some of the most common scraping challenges for you and comes up with a set of features that any scraper needs. Here, we're talking about premium proxies, rotating User Agents, measures against CAPTCHA screens, IP geo-targeting, headless browsers, and many more.
If you're blocked by a website, then ZenRows will remove the roadblocks for you with a single API call. And now you get 1,000 free credits after signing up.
2. Requests
The Requests package is the de facto standard in Python for making HTTP requests. It takes out the difficulties of making requests behind an easy-to-use API, allowing you to concentrate on interacting with servers and their applications. Requests is based on the urllib3 module. It can take a URL with no need for PoolManager instance and, once you make a GET request, you have access to the page.
3. BeautifulSoup
BeautifulSoup is one of the most used Python web scraping tools for parsing HTML and XML documents into a tree structure to detect and extract data, with over 10 million downloads per week. BeautifulSoup provides an interface and automatic encoding conversions to help you extract scraped data in an easier way. One of the great features BeautifulSoup has is that it converts documents to Unicode and so you get UTF-8 documents automatically.
4. Selenium
Selenium is a web browser automation module that allows you to perform activities like a human would in a regular browser, like Google Chrome: scrolling, clicking on buttons, filling forms, and more. These capabilities are very important since they allow our scraper to look less like a bit by simulating human behavior and therefore reduce the risk of getting blocked.
Additionally, headless browser tools like Selenium also allow us to render JavaScript, which is an invaluable feature nowadays. Many websites load content with JS, and anti-bot measures include checking if the user is able to render it to detect if it's a bot or not. Selenium is a popular Python scraping module and one of the libraries you need to try.
5. Pyppeteer
When it comes to JavaScript, you get more compatibility and features if your tool is built on top of it. That's the case of Pyppeteer, an unofficial Python wrapper for Puppeteer, the vastly adopted Javascript Chrome/Chromium browser automation library. Puppeteer is winning popularity so quickly that it's competing hard against Selenium, which adds to the reason why every day more Python developers use the wrapper for this programming language.
6. Playwright
Playwright is a browser automation library developed by Microsoft, similar to Selenium and Pyppeteer. It's a fast and reliable headless browser library that you can run with a few lines of code and is massively used by web scrapers for all sorts of data extraction projects. It supports Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari.
7. urllib3
urllib3 is a tool that relies on other Python scraping libraries and integrates with PoolManager instances, which are response objects that makes the connection pooling and thread in a safe way.
Yet, some cons are that its syntax is less intuitive compared to other ones, like Requests, and it doesn't allow you to scrape dynamic content.
8. Scrapy
Scrapy is a popular framework for beginners that is quite complete and is almost like it included multiple libraries in one. For example, you won't need an HTTP library in addition to it. Also, it enables integrations, so for instance you could implement a CAPTCHA resolver by using default functions or external libraries. In order to build a crawler with Scrapy, all you need to get started is to create a Python class. However, it's not as user-friendly as other Python scraping libraries, and it doesn't allow you to scrape JS-rendered content or pages.
The learning curve for this library is of consideration, but you can do a lot with it following some of the many free tutorials available online.
Conclusion
Any web scraper needs a series of tools to perform different kinds of actions, such as establishing an HTTP connection and rendering JavaScript. In this article, we gave you an overview of the most popular Python web scraping libraries out there to help you accomplish the mission of scraping any webpage, so it's your time to try them out and see which ones are the best fit for you.
As a matter of fact, the biggest challenge web scraping developers in Python share is getting blocked. That's tricky because the more popular the website you're interested in is, the more anti-bot protections it's likely to have set in place. You have to learn about different sorts of techniques, bypass each of them, understand that each site might require different requirements and, even if you succeed, you're going to have to face firewall updates frequently.
Since anti-bot protections are getting as hard to battle against as many using machine learning, for example, a web scraping API like ZenRows designed specifically to give you all the tools you might need to bypass all measures against bots is a must-have. You can sign up on ZenRows and get 1,000 free API credits to see how to scrape any website with a single API call.
