Web scraping

Web scraping is the automated collection of data from websites. A program requests a page, reads its HTML and extracts specific elements such as prices, product names, contact details or article text, then stores them in a structured format like CSV, JSON or a database.

It matters because much useful information is published on the web without any download or API. Scraping lets teams monitor competitors, build lead lists, aggregate listings or feed data into other tools without copying it by hand.

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How web scraping works

A scraper follows a simple sequence: send an HTTP request, receive the HTML, parse it, select the target elements and save the result.

• Request: the program fetches the page like a browser would.
• Parse: the HTML is turned into a tree that can be queried.
• Select: CSS selectors or XPath point to the wanted elements.
• Store: values are written to a file, sheet or database.

A minimal example in Python:

import requests, bs4
html = requests.get(url).text
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
prices = [p.text for p in soup.select(".price")]

Pages that build their content with JavaScript need a headless browser such as Playwright, which loads the page fully before extraction.

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Web scraping vs API

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Legal and ethical limits

Scraping public data is not automatically legal. Check the site terms of use, respect the robots.txt file, avoid personal data unless you have a lawful basis under rules such as the GDPR, and do not bypass access controls. Throttle your requests: aggressive scraping can overload a server and trigger rate limiting or blocking.

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Best practices

Prefer an official API when one exists. Identify your scraper with a clear user agent, cache pages to avoid repeat requests and validate the extracted data, since a small layout change can silently return empty or wrong values. Monitor the scraper and alert when results drop.

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Web scraping at BeBranded

We build data collection workflows that combine scraping, APIs and no-code tools, with clean output and monitoring built in. This sits within our automation service, where we also assess whether a compliant API or integration can replace scraping.