Best practices

  • Ensure you use the correct parser like 'html.parser' or 'lxml' in BeautifulSoup to avoid parsing issues depending on the complexity of the HTML.

  • Always check the response status of your HTTP request to ensure the webpage is accessible before parsing it.

  • Use CSS selectors when you need to target links with specific attributes or within certain elements, as they provide a more flexible querying capability.

  • When extracting href values, validate and sanitize the URLs to avoid potential security risks or errors in data handling.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

Common issues

  • Ensure that the requests library is installed and updated to avoid compatibility issues with BeautifulSoup.

  • Handle exceptions for network errors and invalid URLs to ensure your script runs smoothly without crashing.

  • If the href attribute is missing from some a tags, include a condition to check for None before processing to prevent AttributeError.

  • Consider using a session object from requests for better performance when making multiple requests to the same host.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

Try Oxylabs' Proxies & Scraper API

Residential Proxies

Self-Service

Human-like scraping without IP blocking

From

8

Datacenter Proxies

Self-Service

Fast and reliable proxies for cost-efficient scraping

From

1.2

Web scraper API

Self-Service

Public data delivery from a majority of websites

From

49

Useful resources

laptop illustration Scraping Amazon Product Data
Scraping Amazon Product Data With Python: A Step-by-Step Tutorial
Maryia Stsiopkina avatar

Maryia Stsiopkina

2025-01-17

Pagination In Web Scraping: How Challenging It May Be
Vejune avatar

Vejune Tamuliunaite

2024-09-11

How to Make Web Scraping Faster – Python Tutorial
author avatar

Yelyzaveta Hayrapetyan

2023-03-29

Get the latest news from data gathering world