Web scraping is the automated process of extracting data from websites. Unlike APIs, which provide structured access to data, many websites do not offer programmatic interfaces. However, if the website’s content is not restricted, users can manually access it, and similarly, web scraping allows automated tools to extract this data efficiently.
Crawling refers to the process of following links across web pages to discover new content, while scraping is specifically about extracting and collecting the content from these pages.
A basic understanding of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the standard language for web pages and web applications, is useful for appreciating how spiders traverse a webpage's tree structure to navigate and scrape content. If you are unfamiliar with HTML, refer to the Appendix — HTML Basics for an introduction.
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