Handling Common Challenges

00:00 As you’ve seen in the last couple of lessons, Beautiful Soup gives you a user-friendly interface to interact with the HTML that you scraped from a website.

00:10 Now, there’s only so much that it can do with Beautiful Soup, and if you do a lot of web scraping, you’ll run into some of its limitations. Beautiful Soup works best for small-scale static websites that you’re scraping.

00:23 So if you’re working on a larger project, then I would suggest using Scrapy instead, which is another third-party library that is designed in a way to handle larger scraping tasks.

00:35 A lot of the web these days is generated using JavaScript. So if you’re working with dynamically-generated content, Beautiful Soup won’t help you much as well.

00:45 In this case, you’ll need to pre-render the content using tools such as Selenium. Selenium gives you an option to do what otherwise your browser instance does, is it receives the JavaScript and then executes that code to generate the HTML that in the end is presented to you as a website.

01:04 Now, if you would just use Beautiful Soup to scrape this, you only get back the JavaScript code, which doesn’t actually contain the information that you’re looking for.

01:12 So for these cases, it’s a good idea to use Selenium to handle that JavaScript-generated content.

01:19 So again, Beautiful Soup works best for small-scale projects that only work with static HTML content.