Web Scraping and API Data Collection

Web scraping and APIs are essential for collecting data not available in standard datasets. This lesson covers ethical approaches to data collection.

HTTP Basics

BeautifulSoup for HTML Scraping

Scrapy Framework

REST API Integration

Rate Limiting and Ethics

Key Takeaways

1. Always check robots.txt and terms of service
2. Implement rate limiting to be respectful
3. Use APIs when available - they're more reliable
4. Handle errors and retries gracefully
5. Store data responsibly and check legal compliance