Advanced Web Scraping – Tips From Semalt

Python is a top-ranked programming language that features automatic memory management which contributes to clear programming for both small and large-scale use. Recently, PyMedium, private Medium API written in Python was introduced into the market. PyMedium allows you to detail and post-list information from medium sites.

How Pymedium Works

PyMedium is a read-only Application Programming Interface (API) used to access information from Medium. PyMedium is an advanced web scraping tool that can be customized to meet your web scraping requirements. For IT starters, web scraping is the ultimate solution to extracting data from websites and pages in readable formats.

PyMedium web scraper is now widely used by marketers to parse content. If you are familiar with using browsers plugins to extract data from sites, using PyMedium will just be a walkthrough. To get started, right-click on the target-content and select on the "Inspect element" to identify the tag pattern used in a page. Execute a Python code to get and print the tag pattern.

If you get "None" result, start your Google Chrome and verify you searched the tag pattern correctly. You can also select on "View source" to get the target pattern. If you are keen enough, you will spot the difference between the results displayed after executing "View source" and "Inspect element."

You can use Google Chrome to know whether post content was produced by simple static sites or JavaScript. Here are the two simple ways that will help you find a tag pattern easily.

Inspect element – "Inspect element" helps you to get the HTML of a web page, including JavaScript. However, note that a simple web scraping tool can't retrieve data from dynamic websites. This function can easily be run on your browser by right-clicking on an element and going for the "Inspect element" option.

View source – "View Source" function allows you to get the correct source code of a web page. In this case, you don't have to execute any scripts to get a source code. If you are using a simple web scraper, this is the function to consider. If you fail to find a tag with "View Source" and the tags are readily available in inspect element, consider using a web scraping tool that can scrape JavaScript loading sites.

Using Selenium To Get Medium Post Tags

Selenium is a widely used web scraping tool that works on extracting data from the web. In this case, Selenium will help you to get medium content tags from web pages. However, you have to download and install the software to allow it work on your browser. Whether you are scraping a static or a dynamic website, Selenium will deliver the desired results.

Nowadays, you can use a technique to get HTML tags from Selenium software. However, you have to find the elements specifications first. With Selenium on your Chrome browser, run the software code and load your target-URL to get the tags and parse them. After getting the post content tags, execute parsing on the Medium post to get your desired data.