introduction of Web scraping

What is Web scraping?

Web scarping is a process to extract data or content from a web page and take it into your local system. Using web scraping, you can scrap images, text, audio, video, links, tables, etc from a website. You can scrap data with HTML and also only data, not HTML. Using scraping method you can get whole content of a web page and also a particular content of a web page.

Why do we need web scraping?

Example: 1
Suppose you doing a machine learning project where you need some images of animals. There a web page present which contain images of animals. Using web scraping techniques, you can easily get the images to complete you projects.

Example: 2
Suppose your client wants some information of top 10 doctors in you country. The information are, name, address, email, hospital name and designation. These information's are publicly available on the internet. So search for a website that contain these type of information and scrap those information.

Here I discussed two examples. There are too many reasons to do web scraping.

Is scraping a website legal?

In the internet, some data are publicly available and some data are protected means privet data like, personal data or confidential data, etc. Web scraping is legal if you scrap those data which are publicly available. If you scarp personal data or protected data then it is illegal. So be a ethical web scraper.