![]() ![]() The code below contains the entire set of code for web scraping the NY MTA turnstile data. Now that we understand how to download a file, let’s try downloading the entire set of data files with a for loop. This helps us avoid getting flagged as a spammer. Last but not least, we should include this line of code so that we can pause our code for a second so that we are not spamming the website with requests. download_url = ''+ link (download_url,'./'+link) For my files, I named them “turnstile_180922.txt”, “turnstile_180901”, etc. We provide request.urlretrieve with two parameters: file url and the filename. We can use our urllib.request library to download this file path to our computer. The full url to download the data is actually ‘ /data/nyct/turnstile/turnstile_180922.txt’ which I discovered by clicking on the first data file on the website as a test. Once you’ve clicked on Inspect, you should see this console pop up. This allows you to see the raw code behind the site. On the website, right click and click on Inspect. This code saves the first text file, ‘data/nyct/turnstile/turnstile_180922.txt’ to our variable link. It is important to understand the basics of HTML in order to successfully web scrape. one_a_tag = soup.findAll(‘a’) link = one_a_tag Next, let’s extract the actual link that we want. On the website, right click and click on “Inspect”. It is important to understand the basics of HTML in order to successfully web scrape. If you are not familiar with HTML tags, refer to W3Schools Tutorials. Simply put, there is a lot of code on a website page and we want to find the relevant pieces of code that contains our data. The first thing that we need to do is to figure out where we can locate the links to the files we want to download inside the multiple levels of HTML tags. Web Scraping Tool: For this project, the Python requests library will be an excellent pick to scrape the HTML content of the webpage and SelectorLib library as well for extracting YAML files that will be generated when you will download the HTML content. You may potentially be blocked from the site as well. That can be done using a second Element Click selector that will click it once listing is opened. As Ive mentioned earlier, you need to click Go Back To Results button for WebScraper to continue scraping through listings. Make sure you are not downloading data at too rapid a rate because this may break the website. First of all, you have to either install WebScraper for FireFox browser OR get the latest DEV version for Chrome here.Most sites prohibit you from using the data for commercial purposes. Read through the website’s Terms and Conditions to understand how you can legally use the data.Alright, enough chit-chat, let’s dig into it. Step 1: Inspect the page you want to scrape. These act as alternatives that you might be interested in. Also, you’ll see some bonus steps marked with. Luckily, there’s web-scraping! Important notes about web scraping: To make things easier for you, the tutorial will be broken down into steps. It would be torturous to manually right click on each link and save to your desktop. ![]()
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