Hi and welcome to this interesting section! You're going to learn web
scrapping with Python in this section. In this lecture I wanted to explain
what web scrapping is, so web scrapping means scrapping the web for
information or in other words extracting information from web pages. Let's say you
want to extract information about real estate, maybe want to know the price
trend over time and place and I don't think there exist some nice Excel files
with well structured data that you can go ahead and download and do data
analysis of that right away. In reality such data are spread over HTML web pages
of real estates in the web sites in our example so you're going to have to
scrap them and put them in a structure, in a well structured format
such as an Excel, an excel file, CSV, Pandas dataframes,
or other tabular formats. And putting that in a well structured
format is referred to as web scrapping and Python is excellent in that.
Specifically we're going to use a Python library and named
BeautifulSoup, so in this section I'll introduce you to BeautifulSoup and
we're going to extract some information from a simple web page while I show you
our BeautifulSoup works. Then in the next section, so once we consume the
lectures of this section we'll go ahead and extract some real estate information
such as property addresses, and property price, the area, and other features
of properties, and we're going to extract that information from a big real estate
website, so yeah that's about what web scrapping is, and yeah,
I'll talk to you in the next lecture.