Media & Publishing

How To Extract Thousands Of News Articles In 10 Easy Steps

OVERVIEW Web extraction using Python is extremely easy to do when you follow these 10 easy steps. This blog post […]

Author
Alex Johnson
Alex Johnson
Content Marketing Manager X-Byte

Alex is a Project Engineer who comes with 13 years of professional experience. He holds a certification in CSM.

how-to-extract-thousands-of-news-articles-in-10-easy-steps
Summary

OVERVIEW

Web extraction using Python is extremely easy to do when you follow these 10 easy steps.

This blog post includes the first part: News articles data extraction using Python. We’ll make a script, which extracts the newest news articles from various newspapers as well as saves the text that would be fed in the model afterwards to get predictions in its category.

A Short Introduction about HTML and Webpage Design

In case, we wish to extract different news articles from the website, the initial step is to understand how any website works.

We would follow an example for understanding this:

Whenever we insert the URL into a web browser (i.e. Firefox, Google Chrome, etc.) as well as access to that, what we observe is the grouping of three different technologies:

  • HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language): This is a standard language to add content in a website. This helps us insert images, text, as well as other things in our site. In one words, HTML defines content of all webpages on the internet.
  • CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): The given language permits us in setting the visual designs of any website. This means that it determines the presentation or style of the webpage like layouts, fonts, and colors.
  • JavaScript: JavaScript is the dynamic computer programming language. This helps us make the content as well as style interactive and offers a dynamic interface among client-side use and script.

Note that all these are programming languages. They would permit us to make and manipulate all the design aspects of any webpage.

Let’s prove these concepts using an example. Whenever we visit a Politifact page, we will see these:

So, here, we will ask a question.

“If you wish to extract a webpage’s content using web scraping, where do you want to search?”

So, at that point, we hope that you are very clear about what type of source codes we require to extract. Yes, you are totally right, if you have thought about HTML.

Therefore, the last stage before using any web extraction methods is understanding a bit of HTML.

HTML

HTML is the language, which defines a webpage content as well as constitute of attributes and elements to extract data, you need to be familiar with examining those elements.

The element might be a paragraph, division, heading, anchor tags, and more.

An attribute might be that a heading is within bold letters.

The tags are characterized with the opening symbol as well as closing symbol

e.g.,

So, here, we will ask a question.

“If you wish to extract a webpage’s content using web scraping, where do you want to search?”

So, at that point, we hope that you are very clear about what type of source codes we require to extract. Yes, you are totally right, if you have thought about HTML.

Therefore, the last stage before using any web extraction methods is understanding a bit of HTML.

HTML

HTML is the language, which defines a webpage content as well as constitute of attributes and elements to extract data, you need to be familiar with examining those elements.

The element might be a paragraph, division, heading, anchor tags, and more.

An attribute might be that a heading is within bold letters.

The tags are characterized with the opening symbol as well as closing symbol

e.g.,

This is paragraph.

 

This is heading one in bold letters

 

Scrape Data with BeautifulSoup using Python

Start Your Custom Data Scraping Project

Custom data scraping solutions built around your needs, backed by a team trusted by businesses worldwide.

    Get Quick Response

    Scroll to Top