BeautifulSoup Tutorial: Web Scraping with Python [2026]

[00:00] Have you ever been on a website, scrolling 

[00:05] and thought – I wish I could just grab all of 

[00:10] by one? Well, that's exactly what web scraping 

[00:16] to use a Python library called BeautifulSoup.

[00:25] it's a tool that reads the code behind a webpage 

[00:30] want. Think of a webpage like a magazine. 

[00:35] lets you mark just the quotes, just the author 

[00:42] The best part? You don't need to be an expert. 

[00:48] print statements – you're completely 

[00:53] explain every single line, and by the end of 

[00:58] real website and saving it to a file.

[01:04] Before we install anything, let's set up a 

[01:09] separate workspace just for this project – so 

[01:14] with anything else on your computer.

[01:21] Then navigate to your project 

[01:25] That's it – one command. It creates the virtual 

[01:32] You'll see your terminal change, which means 

[01:38] Now, let's get another thing 

[01:43] pip install requests

[01:48] Python library that lets your code fetch 

[01:53] 'go open this URL for me and bring 

[01:58] We're NOT installing BeautifulSoup yet. There's 

[02:05] Alright, let's write a quick script. 

[02:09] using just requests, with no extra setup.

[02:15] URL, grab the content, and print it out.

[02:25] Okay - you'll see a massive wall of HTML 

[02:31] but it's basically unreadable. You'd have to 

[02:35] one author's name. We need something better.

[02:41] a small label called a user-agent – basically 

[02:48] Python script doesn't send that, so some websites 

[02:54] with adding that label to our request, fixes both 

[03:00] and it organizes that messy HTML into something 

[03:07] Time to install BeautifulSoup in 

[03:12] Note that it's beautifulsoup4 with a 4 at the 

[03:18] Now here are our imports.

[03:32] Now you might be looking at Mozilla/5.0 

[03:37] It's actually a browser signature. When a real 

[03:44] it sends this string to identify itself. 

[03:50] almost every modern browser uses – Chrome, 

[03:57] So by adding this to our request, 

[04:02] I'm a normal browser, not a Python script.' 

[04:09] If you're curious, a full real user-agent 

[04:14] But for our tutorial today, the 

[04:19] Let’s continue the code and 

[04:39] If you see 200 printed – that means success. 

[04:47] everything is fine and you're in. 

[04:52] This is the main part of the video. We're going 

[04:58] from quotes.toscrape.com. This site was built 

[05:04] it's completely safe and legal to use here.

[05:10] BeautifulSoup with this command.

[05:15] the page – all the code that makes the website. 

[05:21] tool to use to read that code. The good news - 

[05:28] Now let's find the quotes. If 

[05:32] you'll see each quote lives inside a div with a 

[05:39] The find_all variable searches through the entire 

[05:51] Now quotes is a list and let's loop through it.

[05:56] one by one and do the following:

[06:01] for a span with the class text, and grabbing 

[06:08] Same idea – find a small tag with the class 

[06:15] specific, because a class name alone isn't always 

[06:21] Here we create an empty list called tags, then 

[06:27] quote and add each one to that list.

[06:40] The '\n' just adds a blank line between 

[06:49] And join(tags) joins all the tags into 

[06:55] Let's run it. 

[06:58] Look at that. Real quotes, real authors, 

[07:04] Now let's save this data to a CSV file so 

[07:10] First import the csv.

[07:18] This line opens a new file called quotes.csv. 

[07:31] it fresh. Newline prevents extra blank lines 

[07:39] makes sure special characters like apostrophes 

[07:45] The writer variable creates a CSV writer – think 

[07:51] writer.writerow writes our header row. The column 

[07:58] author, and tags we already extracted above.

[08:04] same as before – we're just wrapping it inside the 

[08:14] Run it, and you'll see a quotes.csv file 

[08:21] all your quotes are right there.

[08:26] errors you will almost definitely run 

[08:30] it's completely normal, and once you know 

[08:36] We will have a new errors.py file for that.

[08:43] Let me show you this live. Watch what 

[08:58] See that? AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has 

[09:05] because it found nothing, and then .text on 

[09:31] Error two - Empty results.

[09:48] It just returns an empty list [] - no crash, but 

[09:55] tag. Note that during inspection copy the exact 

[10:02] Error three - Connection timeout.

[10:08] our practice site is too fast and reliable – 

[10:15] when you're scraping slower or larger websites,  

[10:18] timeouts will happen. Here's the code you'll 

[10:41] That's it for errors. Three 

[10:45] vast majority of what you'll face as a beginner.

[10:48] Before we finish, a few important 

[10:53] First – always check robots.txt. Go to 

[11:01] end of the URL. Let me show 

[11:03] See these lines?

[11:03] Disallow means don't scrape this section. 

[11:03] this file before scraping any real 

[11:03] Now our practice site quotes.toscrape.com doesn't 

[11:03] intentional. It was built specifically 

[11:03] Now let's talk about how to be polite  

[11:06] when scraping multiple pages.

[11:08] example with time.sleep(1). You add it inside 

[11:08] between requests is polite – you're 

[11:14] Third – always read the terms of service 

[11:20] Some sites explicitly say no scraping. Better 

[11:26] And that's a wrap! Let's do a quick 

[11:32] We started with a problem – a plain requests 

[11:38] and no way to extract anything useful. 

[11:44] added a user-agent header to look like a real 

[11:50] We scraped real quotes, authors, and tags from a 

[11:56] run into, and talked about scraping responsibly 

[12:04] That's a lot for one video – 

[12:09] From here you can scrape 

[12:12] sports stats, product listings – anything 

[12:19] is your starting point for all of it.

[12:24] a comment telling me what you're planning