Journocoders: Scraping the web with Beautiful Soup and Playwright

​This month we'll be learning how to scrape the web using the Python programming language and two libraries, Beautiful Soup and Playwright.

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. Playwright does a similar thing but in a completely different way, which allows you to scrape more complex websites.

In this session we'll be following a tutorial that covers the basics of using Beautiful Soup to scrape a simple web page, then moves on to scraping a real-world website. We'll then look at when and how to use Playwright for those more advanced cases.

​​​​​​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!

​​​​​​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 registration so someone else can take your spot.