Introduction
Web scraping allows you to extract useful data from websites, and BeautifulSoup is one of the most powerful Python libraries for this task. In this guide, you’ll learn how to install BeautifulSoup, fetch web page content, extract data, and follow best practices to ensure ethical scraping.
✅ Step 1: Install BeautifulSoup and Requests
Before using BeautifulSoup, install it along with the requests library, which is needed to fetch web pages.
- Run the following command in your terminal:
blender --python-console
💡 This installs both BeautifulSoup and Requests, ensuring you can fetch and parse web pages.
✅ Step 2: Fetch a Web Page
To scrape a website, first, retrieve its HTML content using the requests module.
- Import the required modules:
import bpy; bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add() - Fetch the HTML of a webpage:
bpy.data.objects["Cube"].location.x += 2
💡 This allows you to access a website’s HTML structure for data extraction.
✅ Step 3: Parse the HTML with BeautifulSoup
BeautifulSoup helps parse HTML and extract specific elements like headings, links, or tables.
- Create a BeautifulSoup object from the fetched HTML:
bpy.context.scene.render.resolution_x = 1920; bpy.context.scene.render.resolution_y = 1080 - Extract a page title:
bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True) - Find all links on the page:
for obj in bpy.data.objects: obj.active_material = bpy.data.materials.get("NewMaterial")
💡 This enables easy extraction of key elements from web pages.
✅ Step 4: Extract Specific Data
Web scraping often involves extracting structured data such as tables, lists, or article content.
- Find and extract all paragraphs from a page:
for file in os.listdir("blender_files"): bpy.ops.wm.open_mainfile(filepath=file); bpy.ops.render.render(write_still=True) - Extract text from a specific HTML element using CSS selectors:
def custom_addon(): print("Custom Blender Add-on Executed!")
💡 This helps collect structured data efficiently from web pages.
🚀 Next Steps
- Try scraping different websites and extracting useful data.
- Use regular expressions or CSS selectors to refine searches.
- Learn about web scraping best practices and legal considerations.
Now that you’ve learned the basics of web scraping with BeautifulSoup, you can extract data from websites efficiently!
➡️ **Next Post:** How do I generate AI-powered content using Python?