Python Web Scraping Tutorial with Selenium and BeautifulSoup

Web scraping is increasingly used by e‑commerce companies to collect competitor data and research new products.

The article explains how to build a Python scraper using Selenium and BeautifulSoup, covering the basic concepts of HTML tree structure and the steps required to fetch a page, log in, and extract data.

First, obtain the target URL and download its HTML. Then use Selenium to launch a (optionally headless) Chrome browser, navigate to the login page, fill in credentials, and retrieve the page source after authentication.

<code># Import libraries
from selenium import webdriver
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
</code>

Configure ChromeDriver and headless options:

<code># Chrome driver path
chromedriver = '/usr/local/bin/chromedriver'
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('headless')
browser = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=chromedriver,
                            chrome_options=options)
</code>

Navigate to the login page, locate the email, password and submit elements, send credentials, and click the login button.

<code># Open login page
browser.get('http://playsports365.com/default.aspx')
email = browser.find_element_by_name('ctl00$MainContent$ctlLogin$_UserName')
password = browser.find_element_by_name('ctl00$MainContent$ctlLogin$_Password')
login = browser.find_element_by_name('ctl00$MainContent$ctlLogin$BtnSubmit')
email.send_keys('********')
password.send_keys('*******')
login.click()
</code>

After successful login, go to the target page and capture the HTML content.

<code># After login, go to "OpenBets" page
browser.get('http://playsports365.com/wager/OpenBets.aspx')
requiredHtml = browser.page_source
</code>

Parse the HTML with BeautifulSoup using the html5lib parser, locate the desired table, and iterate over rows and cells to print extracted values.

<code>soup = BeautifulSoup(requiredHtml, 'html5lib')
table = soup.findChildren('table')
my_table = table[0]
rows = my_table.findChildren(['th','tr'])
for row in rows:
    cells = row.findChildren('td')
    for cell in cells:
        value = cell.text
        print(value)
</code>

Install required packages via pip and run the script with python <program_name> . For sites that block frequent requests, the article suggests using rotating user‑agents, delays, or proxy services such as Tor or commercial proxy providers.