What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping means automatically extracting data from websites. Instead of copying information by hand, you write code that does it for you.

Think of it like this: a website displays data in a nice visual format for humans. Scraping lets your Python code read that same data and save it for analysis.

Common uses include:

• Collecting product prices from e-commerce sites
• Gathering news headlines
• Building datasets for research
• Monitoring competitor websites

Python is perfect for scraping because of libraries like requests (to fetch pages) and BeautifulSoup (to parse HTML).

I cover web scraping fundamentals in my Web Scraping course.