Python Social Media Analytics

Introduction to scraping

Since the beginning of the web, web scraping has been the main challenge for anyone who wanted to exploit the richness of information available on the Internet. In the very beginning, very few APIs were available and people used to copy the content of websites by just using copy-paste schema. Then, some programmatic tools were created to follow links (crawling) and extract the content from web pages (scraping). The information was structured by using text patterns (regex) or DOM (Document Object Model) parsing methods. More recently, the development of semantic analysis tools and artificial intelligence enabled alternative approaches, which are much more efficient and closer to human understanding and interpretation ...