Scraping the web with Beautiful Soup

This month we'll be learning how to scrape the web using the Python programming language and a library named Beautiful Soup.

Beautiful Soup is a Python library for extracting data out of web pages. It is known for being pretty easy to use and good at dealing with poorly-constructed pages where the HTML is a mess. This makes it great for scraping data out of web pages -- one of the most useful data journalism skills.

In this session we'll be following a tutorial that covers the basics of using Beautiful Soup to scrape a simple web pages, then moves on to dealing with multiple pages, and how to approach more complex sites where other techniques are required to get at the data you need.

All of our events are suitable for beginners, and no programming experience is required. Bring a laptop along as this a practical, hands-on workshop. Please also sign up for a Dropbox account if you don't already have one so you can edit the shared doc we'll be using during the event.

Schedule
7:00 🚪 Doors open
7:30 🗣 Show and tell
7:40 💻 Tutorial
9:00 🍺 Drinks at the Prince Arthur

If you can't make the main event, you're also welcome to just join us in the pub from 9!

What is Journocoders? We are a community and monthly meetup for journalists and other people in the media who want to learn technical skills for use in their reporting -- and meet likeminded others.

Our events do often fill up, but if it's full please do join the waitlist as spaces do typically become available. And if you find you can no longer make it, please update your RSVP so someone else can take your spot.