scrapy and BeautifulSoup are the two most popular packages when it comes to web scraping in Python though they are very different.
Scrapy is a full web scraping framework - capable of downloading and parsing pages while BeautifulSoup can only parse them. Usually, bs4 is paired with an HTTP client to download pages (like requests).
Scrapy is a full web scraping framework - capable of downloading and parsing pages while BeautifulSoup can only parse them. Usually, bs4 is paired with an HTTP client to download pages (like requests).
Scrapy has its own HTML parsing engine called parsel which is an alternative to Beautiful Soup.
Which one is better and which one should be used? Both Scrapy's Parsel and BeautifulSoup can effectively parse almost any scraped HTML though there are a few key differences:
- Scrapy's parsel supports XPath Selectors which are very powerful for parsing complex HTML structures. Beautifulsoup does not support XPath.
- BeautifulSoup comes with useful utility functions like pretty HTML output and easy HTML tree modification making it easier to extract raw HTML.
Generally, we recommend sticking with BeautifulSoup for smaller or domain-specific scrapers and using Scrapy for medium to big web scraping projects that need more speed and control over the whole scraping process.
To add, migrating should be easy between these two packages as both support parsing using CSS selectors.
