Today we are going to see how we can scrape Weather data using Python and BeautifulSoup in a simple and elegant manner.
The aim of this article is to get you started on a real-world problem solving while keeping it super simple so you get familiar and get practical results as fast as possible.
So the first thing we need is to make sure we have Python 3 installed. If not, you can just get Python 3 and get it installed before you proceed.
Then you can install beautiful soup with:
We will also need the libraries requests, lxml and soupsieve to fetch data, break it down to XML, and to use CSS selectors. Install them using...
Once installed open an editor and type in...
Now let's go to the Weather.com 10 day forecast page and inspect the data we can get.
This is how it looks:
Back to our code now. Let's try and get this data by pretending we are a browser like this.
Save this as weather_bs.py.
If you run it.
You will see the whole HTML page.
Now let's use CSS selectors to get to the data we want. To do that let's go back to Chrome and open the inspect tool.
We notice that all the individual rows of data are contained in a with the class 'clickable closed'. We can get BeautifulSoup to select that data like this.
This print all the content in each of the rows.
We now can pick out classes inside these rows that contain the data we want. The date is in the day-detail class.
If you run it will print out all the days.
Bingo!! we got the days.
Now with the same process, we get the other data like weather description, temperature, wind speed, precipitation etc.
We even added a separator to show where each day ends. You can now pass this data into an array or save it to CSV and do whatever you want.
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