How a little Selenium knowledge can go a long way — What’s a bot? A bot is a program that interacts with web elements (elements from a website, web application, etc.). It makes it seem as if an actual person is using some web application, when in reality, it’s really a program. …

Analyzing an incredible feature — The usual way of doing things The code above shows that the BeautifulSoup constructor (on line 12, imported as soup) takes in arguments of a site’s HMTL and a string indicating the type of parser that we need. This creates a BeautifulSoup object that we can use to scrape data from. Scraping a page or…

Let me explain… — Being new to the process Yes, I was dropped from all of my classes in my very first semester of college. I thought that I was prepared by enrolling as soon as they became available. I had this foolish assumption that you could make your payments by the end of the semester. This could not…

Bringing everything together — Adding the imports The code above imports the Beautiful Soup library, urlopen function, BeautifulSoup function, and csv module. You will see how each of these things are used as we continue with the code. Getting the HTML and performing parsing In Python, you can import a function through a different alias. Therefore, request(url) and soup(page_html, ‘html.parser’) are…

Downloading the right tools for the job — What’s a web scraper? We can write programs that allow us to read certain kinds of files. These can include text (.txt), comma-separated values (.csv), and image files (.jpg, .png, .bmp) (just to name a few). However, a web scraper is an application that reads the HTML code from a website. …

A mind-numbing concept simplified — What’s all the fuss about? Recursion seems to be the one topic that gives every beginning computer science student a headache for months. This concept can be introduced through a variety of different materials, however, it is most notably seen in the form of recursive functions. Functions, in general, are used to group statements together…

Addressing an existential crisis — I have been stuck trying to figure out the answer to this question for what seems like an eternity. More and more people have no curiosity left in their lives. No one wants to know why anything happens anymore. Questions like: “Who am I?,” “Why does the universe exist?,” “Why…

What is string slicing? String slicing is Python’s way of generating a substring. A substring is a part of a string. For example, “Hi there!” is a string and “there!” is a substring of the original string. String slicing syntax phrase = 'Python String Slicing' phrase[0:6] # 'Python' phrase[7:13] # 'String' phrase[14:len(phrase)] # 'Slicing' The code above…

Putting the mystery to rest I always had a difficult time knowing whether or not I could use a ternary operator ((condition) ? a : b) in my code. It was never made clear to me about which situation needed to arise in order for this operator to be deployed. Eventually, I figured out this…