Web scraping with Python

Use urllib2 in combination with the brilliant BeautifulSoup library:

import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
# or if you're using BeautifulSoup4:
# from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen('http://example.com').read())

for row in soup('table', {'class': 'spad'})[0].tbody('tr'):
    tds = row('td')
    print tds[0].string, tds[1].string
    # will print date and sunrise

You can use urllib2 to make the HTTP requests, and then you'll have web content.

You can get it like this:

import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen('http://example.com')
html = response.read()

Beautiful Soup is a python HTML parser that is supposed to be good for screen scraping.

In particular, here is their tutorial on parsing an HTML document.

Good luck!

Python has good options to scrape the web. The best one with a framework is scrapy. It can be a little tricky for beginners, so here is a little help.
1. Install python above 3.5 (lower ones till 2.7 will work).
2. Create a environment in conda ( I did this).
3. Install scrapy at a location and run in from there.
4. Scrapy shell will give you an interactive interface to test you code.
5. Scrapy startproject projectname will create a framework.
6. Scrapy genspider spidername will create a spider. You can create as many spiders as you want. While doing this make sure you are inside the project directory.

The easier one is to use requests and beautiful soup. Before starting give one hour of time to go through the documentation, it will solve most of your doubts. BS4 offer wide range of parsers that you can opt for. Use user-agent and sleep to make scraping easier. BS4 returns a bs.tag so use variable[0]. If there is js running, you wont be able to scrape using requests and bs4 directly. You could get the api link then parse the JSON to get the information you need or try selenium.