AI-Guided Tutorial: Web Scraping with Python

Learn how to extract data from websites using Python through interactive AI guidance. Web scraping is a powerful technique for gathering information from the internet.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this tutorial, you should understand:

• What web scraping is and when it’s appropriate to use
• How to make HTTP requests with Python
• HTML basics and how to parse web content
• Using libraries like requests and BeautifulSoup
• Ethical considerations and best practices for web scraping
• How to handle common web scraping challenges

Tutorial Instructions

Part 1: Introduction to Web Scraping

1. Open VS Code and create web_scraping_tutorial.py
2. Ask Copilot Chat:

   What is web scraping and how does it work? Show me a simple example of making HTTP requests and getting web page content in Python.
   

Part 2: Making HTTP Requests

Ask Copilot Chat:

How do I use the requests library in Python to get web page content? Show me how to handle different response codes and check if requests are successful.

Practice Task: Make requests to different websites and examine the responses.

Part 3: HTML Basics for Scraping

Ask Copilot Chat:

What HTML basics do I need to know for web scraping? Explain HTML tags, attributes, and how to identify the data I want to extract.

Practice Task: Examine the HTML source of a simple webpage.

Part 4: Introduction to BeautifulSoup

Ask Copilot Chat:

How do I use BeautifulSoup to parse HTML in Python? Show me how to find elements by tag, class, id, and other attributes.

Practice Task: Install BeautifulSoup and practice finding elements in HTML.

Part 5: Extracting Data

Ask Copilot Chat:

How do I extract text, links, and other data from HTML elements using BeautifulSoup? Show me practical examples of data extraction.

Practice Task: Extract headlines or article titles from a news website.

Part 6: Handling Tables and Lists

Ask Copilot Chat:

How do I scrape data from HTML tables and lists? Show me how to extract structured data and convert it to Python data structures.

Practice Task: Scrape a simple data table from a website.

Part 7: Error Handling and Robustness

Ask Copilot Chat:

What errors can occur during web scraping and how do I handle them? Show me how to deal with missing elements, network issues, and rate limiting.

Practice Task: Add error handling to your scraping scripts.

Part 8: Ethics and Best Practices

Ask Copilot Chat:

What are the ethical considerations and best practices for web scraping? How do I respect robots.txt, avoid overwhelming servers, and stay legal?

Part 9: Advanced Techniques

Ask Copilot Chat:

Show me advanced web scraping techniques: handling JavaScript content, using headers, sessions, and dealing with dynamic websites.

Assessment Challenge

Create a Python program that:

• Scrapes data from a public website (like quotes, news headlines, or product info)
• Handles potential errors gracefully
• Respects the website’s robots.txt file
• Organizes the scraped data in a useful format
• Demonstrates proper web scraping ethics

Important Ethical Guidelines

Before scraping any website:

1. Check the website’s robots.txt file
2. Read the terms of service
3. Don’t overwhelm servers with too many requests
4. Respect copyright and data ownership
5. Consider using official APIs when available

Reflection Questions

Ask Copilot Chat:

1. “When should I use web scraping vs APIs?”
2. “How can I make my web scraping more respectful and ethical?”
3. “What are the legal considerations for web scraping?”

Take a look at the web scraping lab and make sure you are prepared to work on this in class.