Simple ideas for such analysis include: Analyzing the rate of requests There may be anti-scraping mechanisms set up on the server side to analyze incoming traffic and browsing patterns, and block automated programs from browsing their site. HTTP Status CodeĪs we mentioned earlier, the answer to "What could go wrong while scraping?" also depends on the intent of the website owners. If we get the following response codes back from the server, then it's probably an indication that we need to get the authentication right to be able to scrape. Setting headers: There might be certain headers that we need to set ( referer, authorization, etc.).Hidden values: Along with username and password, you might need to add other fields to the POST payload (usually CSRF_TOKEN, but can also be some weird data).However, there can also be certain subtleties like: For simpler websites, authentication might be as easy as making a POST request with username and password or storing the cookie. Many websites have some sort of authentication that we'll have to take care of in our scraping program. Webpages with pre-loaders like percentage bars or loading spinners.Webpages with infinite scrolling (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).This happens because the information that we are actually looking for is either rendered at the browser side by libraries like Handlebars or React, or fetched by making future AJAX calls to the server and then rendered by the browser. The initial response that we receive from the server might not contain the information that we expected as per visual inspection. This is one of the most common problems that developers face when scraping a Javascript-heavy website. Complexities of Web Scraping Asynchronous loading and client-side rendering Let's list down these complexities one by one, and see the solutions for them in the next section. Some complexities are easy to get around with, and some aren't. They can deliberately introduce complexities to make the scraping process tricky. The answer to this mostly depends upon the way the site is programmed and the intent of the website owner. Seems like an easy process, right? What could go wrong? We'll use BeautifulSoup for parsing the HTML. Let's write a simple Python function to get this value. A simple Google search leads me to Socialblade's Real-time Youtube Subscriber Count Page.įrom visual inspection, we find that the subscriber count is inside a tag with ID rawCount. Finally, we use the information for whatever purpose we intended to.įor example, let's say we want to extract the number of subscribers of PewDiePie and compare it with T-series. The following steps involve methodically making requests to the webpage and implementing the logic for extracting the information, using the patterns we identified. The first step involves using built-in browser tools (like Chrome DevTools and Firefox Developer Tools) to locate the information we need on the webpage and identifying structures/patterns to extract it programmatically.
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