Web scraping is the ideal solution to retrieve a large amount of data from multiple websites efficiently. It automates the process, eliminating the need for manual data collection from each website.
Examining a webpage's structure and HTML content allows you to identify the specific elements and data you want to extract. These elements include text, tables, images, links, and more. Using Python's web scraping libraries, you can write scripts to automate the process of retrieving data from websites. The libraries provide functions and methods to fetch web page content, parse the HTML, and extract the desired data. This article briefly explained how to scrape Flipkart product data using the most common scraping methods.
Data scraping from an Ecommerce website with Python enables you to collect information for various purposes, such as market research, data analysis, price comparison, sentiment analysis, and more. However, it is essential to note that when performing web scraping, you should be mindful of the website's terms of service and legal implications.
In this Python-focused article, we will explore the concept of web scraping and demonstrate how to extract data from a website. Before that, we will emphasize what web scraping is and its application.
About Flipkart: Flipkart is one of the largest e-commerce platforms in India. It was founded in 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal and started as an online bookstore. Over the years, it has expanded its product range and services to become a comprehensive online marketplace.
Web scraping is an automated technique that extracts essential data from websites. The data found on websites is typically unstructured, but web scraping enables the collection and organization of this unstructured data into a structured format. Various approaches to performing web scraping include utilizing online services, APIs, or writing custom code. Scrape Flipkart data to gather large amounts of data from websites for various purposes. Let's explore some typical applications of web scraping:
Python's simplicity, extensive library support, readability, and strong community make it an excellent choice for web scraping tasks. It balances ease of use and powerful functionality, allowing developers to extract and manipulate website data efficiently.
While there are several programming languages suitable for web scraping, Python stands out for the following reasons:
Identify the Target URL: Determine the website URL from which you want to extract data.
Inspect the Page: The Flipkart Product Data Scraping Services first use web browser tools or developer tools to inspect the HTML structure of the webpage. It helps identify the specific elements containing the desired data.
Locate the Data: Analyze the HTML structure and identify the HTML tags, classes, or identifiers associated with the data you want to extract. It could include text, tables, images, links, or other elements.
Write the Code: Utilize Python's web scraping libraries, such as BeautifulSoup or Scrapy, to write code that fetches the HTML content from the target URL, parses the HTML, and extracts the desired data based on the identified elements.
Execute the Code: Run the Python script or code to initiate the web scraping process. The code will send a request to the URL, retrieve the HTML content, and extract the specified data.
Store the Data: Once extracted, you can store it in a suitable format such as CSV, JSON, a database, or any other preferred format for further analysis or use.
We will use the following libraries to scrape data from Flipkart Website using Python.
Libraries Used
Selenium: Selenium is a web testing library that enables the automation of browser activities. It is helpful for tasks such as web scraping and testing, requiring automated interaction with web pages. With Selenium, you can simulate user actions like clicking buttons, filling out forms, and navigating websites.
BeautifulSoup: BeautifulSoup is a Python package designed explicitly for parsing HTML and XML documents. It provides a convenient way to navigate, search, and extract data from the parsed document structure. BeautifulSoup creates a parse tree, making accessing specific elements easier and extracting desired data from HTML or XML pages during web scraping.
Pandas: Pandas is a powerful Python library for data manipulation and analysis. It offers high-performance data structures like DataFrames, ideal for organizing and processing structured data. Pandas can extract data from various sources in web scraping and store it in the desired format, such as CSV, Excel, or databases. It also provides data cleaning, transformation, aggregation, and statistical analysis functions, enabling in-depth exploration of the extracted data.
Here, we will extract the Flipkart website to collect the laptops' prices, names, and ratings. The URL for this page is
https://www.flipkart.com/lenovo-ideapad-3-intel-core-i3-11th-gen-8-gb-512-gb-ssd-wind[…]pn=sp&ssid=s5omk5xe680000001688710257903&qH=d974031e5523989b
The data lies within the tags. So, we will first inspect the page on which the data lies. To inspect the page, right-click on the element and then on Inspect.
After clicking on the Inspect tab, you will find Browser Inspector Box.
Here, we will extract the Price, Name, and Rating within the ‘div’ tag.
For this, we will create a Python file by opening the terminal in Ubuntu and then typing gedit
We will name the file ‘web-s.’
gedit web-s.py
We will import all the necessary libraries.
We will set the path to inspect the Chrome driver.
driver = webdriver.Chrome ("/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromedriver")
You can refer to the below code to open the URL
Now, it’s time to extract the data from the website. The data we want to extract lies within < div> tags. Refer to the code below:
Use the below command to run the code.
python web-s.py
After extracting the data, store it in the desired format. Here, we will store the extracted data in a CSV format.
We generated the file in the name ‘products.csv.’
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