WebScraping.com Logo

Blog

  • What is CSV?

    Learn Example

    CSV stands for comma separated values. It is a spreadsheet format where each column is separated by a comma and each row by a newline. Here is an example CSV file:

  • How to teach yourself web scraping

    Learn Python Big picture

    I often get asked how to learn about web scraping. Here is my advice.

    First learn a popular high level scripting language. A higher level language will allow you to work and test ideas faster. You don’t need a more efficient compiled language like C because the bottleneck when web scraping is bandwidth rather than code execution. And learn a popular one so that there is already a community of other people working at similar problems so you can reuse their work. I use Python, but Ruby or Perl would also be a good choice.

    The following advice will assume you want to use Python for web scraping.
    If you have some programming experience then I recommend working through the Dive Into Python book:

    Make sure you learn all the details of the urllib2 module. Here are some additional good resources: