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Big data is the necessity and prospect of the digital world. Businesses rely on it for varied purposes. The internet is full of data and any business can extract data of varied types for their business. Data extraction or scraping is executed in two ways; manually and automatically. Python scraping is renowned for automatic web scraping.

• Beautifulsoup

Beautiful soup is one of the best and most sought after Python scraping libraries. It can pull data from XML and HTML. It is the easiest to learn for any budding programmer.

It has some dependencies like a “request library” for accessing the website. Besides, you need to use external parsers for data extraction. The use of dependencies makes the coding transfer intricate. Though its code transfer is complicated, it is the only Python scraping library with few lines of code.

• Selenium

The interesting fact is that Selenium is not created to be a tool for web scraping. It was a web driver rendering website pages for test automation of web applications. Now you can use this for Python scraping as it resonates with Javascript. Many websites use Javascript for creating dynamic web pages. Selenium is a great option if you want to extract all kinds of data on the web page. It extracts everything including multimedia elements. 

It is a friendly tool but a little difficult to master. Moreover, it allows you to include actions such as click a button, select the drop-down menu and maximize windows. 

The only distressing factor is its low speed. It is slower than an HTTP request and makes Python scraping longer but still, you can use it if speed is not a concern. Or you have few websites to extract. 

• Scrapy 

Python scraping in India also uses the Scrapy framework for data extraction. The framework is exclusively dedicated to scraping and crafted using Python. It can work without traditional threading models. Its twisted asynchronous framework responds to different connections very easily. 

The speed it provides is fantastic. For this reason, it is widely used for web scraping along with beautiful soup. All web requests for parsing are made parallel and it increases scalability. One of the major drawbacks of the Scrapy framework is that it can not extract Javascripts by default. The learning is difficult compared to Beautifulsoup and Selenium. Moreover, the installation setup is also intricate; especially for a budding person.

Identifying the merits and demerits of each tool will let you select the best from the three. It is said that for large extraction projects you can fearlessly opt Scrapy framework for its greater functionalities and architecture. On the other hand, for simple and small web scraping projects, Beautifulsoup is the best choice. Selenium would be in the middle. You can use it as per your requirement.

About us

Brainfuel is the trusted Python scraping company in India that provides accurate web scraping services for diverse businesses. We deliver the best bespoke solutions that help you understand your customer’s requirements in no time. Our team has a deep understanding of web scraping tools and the latest solutions.