Python Regex for Web Scraping

In this article we want to learn about Python Regex for Web Scraping, web scraping is a process that we can extract data from websites. it is one of the best skills for data analysts, researchers and developers who need to extract data from different websites. on the other hand Python is popular programming languages for web scraping, because Python is easy also it has a lot of libraries for web scraping, regular expressions (regex) is a module that we can use for web scraping in Python.

Python Regex for Web Scraping

Regex is powerful tool for web scraping because it allows you for pattern matching in the text. also it enables developers to extract specific information from text bases data sources such as HTML or XML files, now let’s learn about the basics of regex in Python and how we can use that in web scraping.

So first of all let’s learn about the basics of regex in Python, for using regex in Python, first we need to import that module in our code.

This is a simple example that uses regex to match a string.

import re

string = "Welcome to geekscoders.com"
pattern = r"geekscoders"
match = re.search(pattern, string)
print(match.group(0))

import re

string = "Welcome to geekscoders.com"

pattern = r"geekscoders"

match = re.search(pattern, string)

print(match.group(0))

In the above example we have created a regex pattern that matches the string geekscodeers and after that use re.search method to search for that pattern in the string. if the pattern is found match will contain the matched string and we print that.

This will be the result

So now we have created a basic example of regex, let’s look at how we can use it for web scraping. this is an example that extracts all the links from a web page.

import requests
import re
import pprint

url = "https://geekscoders.com"
response = requests.get(url)
html = response.text

pattern = r'<a href="(.*?)">'
links = re.findall(pattern, html)

pprint.pprint(links)

import requests

import re

import pprint

url = "https://geekscoders.com"

response = requests.get(url)

html = response.text

pattern = r'<a href="(.*?)">'

links = re.findall(pattern, html)

pprint.pprint(links)

In the above example we have used requests library to get the HTML content of a web page. after that we have created a regex pattern that matches all the links on the page, then we use re.findall method to find all instances of this pattern in the HTML content.

This will be the result