Practice Exercise #6 – Scraping data from HTML pages
Assignment Summary
This exercise builds off of the previous week’s Pandas II activity. In this scenario, we will scrape HTML (hypertext markup language) pages from the web using Beautiful Soup. We will freeze a “snapshot” of this page into a python program, and then work with the data as a Pandas dataframe. While we won’t analyze the data in-depth just yet, we will clean up the data.
Video
Today’s Assignment
Task 1: Select a wikipedia page for a TV show of your choosing and scrap its data into a Pandas dataframe using the Beautiful Soup template below. Please be sure to ‘make a copy’ (or just copy and paste) this example — do not edit directly!
Task 2: Clean up the data, removing “\n” delimiters and setting up your dataframe columns (as per the template below). Try commenting out (turning “off” steps in the program) to see how the python code is preparing the data.