Web Scrape with Python in 4 minutes

Web Scraping

Web scraping is a technique to automatically access and extract large amounts of information from a website, which can save a huge amount of time and effort.

New York MTA Data

We will be downloading turnstile data from this site:

http://web.mta.info/developers/turnstile.html

Turnstile data is compiled every week from May 2010 to present, so hundreds of .txt files exist on the site. Each date is a link to the .txt file that you can download.

Inspecting the Website

The first thing that we need to do is to figure out where we can locate the links to the files we want to download inside the multiple levels of HTML tags. Simply put, there is a lot of code on a website page and we want to find the relevant pieces of code that contains our data.

• On the website, right click and click on “Inspect”. This allows you to see the raw code behind the site.
• Notice that on the top left of the console, there is an arrow symbol.

  If you click on this arrow and then click on an area of the site itself, the code for that particular item will be highlighted in the console.

Python Code

We start by importing the following libraries.

import requests
import urllib.request
import time
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

Next, we set the url to the website and access the site with our requests library.

url = 'http://web.mta.info/developers/turnstile.html'
response = requests.get(url)

Next we parse the html with BeautifulSoup so that we can work with a nicer, nested BeautifulSoup data structure.

soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, “html.parser”)

We use the method .findAll to locate all of our tags.

soup.findAll('a')

This code gives us every line of code that has an tag. The information that we are interested in starts on line 38. That is, the very first text file is located in line 38, so we want to grab the rest of the text.

Next, let’s extract the actual link that we want. Let’s test out the first link.

one_a_tag = soup.findAll(‘a’)[38]
link = one_a_tag[‘href’]

This code saves the first text file, ‘data/nyct/turnstile/turnstile_180922.txt’ to our variable link. The full url to download the data is actually ‘http://web.mta.info/developers/data/nyct/turnstile/turnstile_180922.txt’ which I discovered by clicking on the first data file on the website as a test. We can use our urllib.request library to download this file path to our computer. We provide request.urlretrieve with two parameters: file url and the filename. For my files, I named them “turnstile_180922.txt”, “turnstile_180901”, etc.

download_url = 'http://web.mta.info/developers/'+ link
urllib.request.urlretrieve(download_url,'./'+link[link.find('/turnstile_')+1:])

Last but not least, we should include this line of code so that we can pause our code for a second so that we are not spamming the website with requests. This helps us avoid getting flagged as a spammer.

time.sleep(1)