Web Scraping Using Beautiful Soup

This paper explores the power of Beautiful Soup, a Python library, for web scraping. We delve into the advantages of web scraping for data acquisition, highlighting its limitations and ethical considerations. Subsequently, we dissect the core functionalities of Beautiful Soup, showcasing its effectiveness in parsing HTML content, identifying elements, and extracting desired information. Through practical case studies involving news data mining, product information extraction, and academic research data collection, we demonstrate the versatility and efficiency of Beautiful Soup. We compare it to other scraping tools and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we conclude by summarizing our findings, discussing the future of web scraping, and suggesting potential improvements for Beautiful Soup.