Python

Python is deffo an A-lister of worlds' programming languages. It's free, powerful, easy to read and understand. By the way, besides web and software development, you can use Python for data analytics, machine learning, and more.

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MechanicalSoup Python

MechanicalSoup Python: A Complete Guide to Scraping, Forms, and Proxies

When you need to scrape 50 pages of search results behind a login wall, raw Requests + Beautiful Soup force you to track cookies and assemble form payloads by hand, while Selenium launches a full browser for pages that don't even use JavaScript. MechanicalSoup sits between those extremes. It wraps Requests and Beautiful Soup into a stateful browser that handles web scraping sessions, forms, and navigation automatically. This guide covers everything from installation to proxy-powered production scrapers.
How to Build a News Crawler in Python

How to build a news crawler in Python: step-by-step guide

A news crawler is a tool that automatically pulls content from news websites. A web news crawler helps with tracking competitors, feeding LLM pipelines, or watching topic coverage across publishers. This guide walks you through building a configurable proxy-integrated Python news crawler that’ll target multiple news sources, handles proxy rotation, and saves structured results on a schedule.
Python Extract Text From HTML

Python Extract Text From HTML: A Step-by-Step Guide With Code Examples

Extracting text from HTML in Python is one of the most common tasks in web scraping, NLP pipelines, search indexing, and data preparation. The goal is to keep the visible content from a webpage while removing all the HTML markup, scripts, and styles that surround it. This guide walks you through the popular Python libraries for HTML text extraction and a full step-by-step workflow to go from raw HTML to clean, production-ready text.
How To Build a Rank Tracker

How To Build a Rank Tracker: Manual Checks, Python Automation, and Modern SERP Tracking

On a recent run, wired.com ranked no. 1 on US desktop and no. 2 on UK desktop computers for "best laptop 2026". Same query, same hour, different country. That gap is what a single-number rank tracker misses, especially now that modern SERPs add AI Overview citations, featured snippets, and "People also ask" blocks that most older tracking tools ignore. This post walks through building a tracker that captures all of it, starting with a manual baseline for ground truth, then moving to a Python implementation against a SERP API, and finally setting up a scaling path for more keywords and locations.
Python Try and Except

Python Try and Except: How to Handle Errors Without Crashing Your Script

An unhandled runtime error crashes a Python program immediately. The try/except is the standard mechanism for handling those failures and keeping the script under control. This guide covers all the exception-handling clauses: tryexceptelsefinally, and raise, alongside practical guidelines for keeping exception handlers narrow, explicit, and maintainable.
urllib3 vs. Requests

urllib3 vs. Requests: Which Python HTTP Library to Use?

Choosing between urllib3 and Requests is like choosing between a manual and an automatic transmission, except one (Requests) is built into the other (urllib3). The automatic gets you moving in seconds, but the manual gives you control over every shift. Both libraries power web scraping, API calls, and automation, and this article will tell you which belongs in your project.
What is Charles Proxy

What is Charles Proxy: Traffic Inspection, Debugging, And Web Scraping Guide

Charles Proxy (or simply Charles) is an HTTP debugging proxy that acts as a man-in-the-middle between the computer and the internet, which developers and QA teams use to monitor, inspect, and modify data flow. In web scraping, it allows users to intercept, decrypt, and manipulate network traffic to extract data. This guide covers setup, core features, SSL handling, practical use cases, scraping workflows, troubleshooting, and notable alternatives of Charles Proxy.
Elixir Web Scraping

Elixir Web Scraping: A Practical Step-by-Step Guide

Elixir web scraping solves one of the hardest problems in high-volume data collection: concurrency without thread overhead. The BEAM virtual machine (Erlang's runtime) runs each HTTP request as a lightweight process, not an OS thread, so you can fetch thousands of pages concurrently. If a process crashes, the supervisor restarts it automatically. This guide builds a complete Elixir scraper from scratch, covering static pages, paginated targets, JavaScript-heavy sites, and anti-bot countermeasures.
Playwright XPath

Playwright XPath: How to Locate and Interact With Elements

If you're building a Playwright scraper and not using Xpath, you're probably leaving your most precise location strategy on the table. Think of the DOM as a tree of nodes, and an XPath expression as the specific zip code to reach any node. In this article, we'll explain XPath fundamentals, how to construct XPath expressions, and how to interact with elements, including real-world examples.

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Top Python Scraping Libraries: Overview, Comparison, and How to Choose the Right One

Python has the richest scraping ecosystem of any language. That breadth is exactly why making a choice is harder than it should be. This article continues from our Python web scraping guide, focusing on the selection problem: 8 libraries across 4 categories, what each one does best, where it breaks down, and how to choose the right one for the job.
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Wait for Page to Load in Beautiful Soup: Why It Fails and How to Fix It

Waiting for a page to load when using Beautiful Soup is a common challenge in web scraping, especially when your scraper returns empty results because the page renders content via JavaScript. This happens because Beautiful Soup is a parser, not a browser, so it can’t execute JavaScript or wait for dynamic content to load. To handle this, you can use browser automation tools like Selenium or Playwright, a lightweight option like requests-html, or a Web Scraping API for production-grade workflows.
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How to Fix SSLError in Python Requests: Causes and Solutions

An SSL error means the TLS handshake failed: your application encountered an SSL certificate it couldn't verify, so the connection was rejected. This issue commonly shows up during web scraping or when integrating with external APIs. In this guide, we'll explain what this error means, its causes, and walk you through the right fix for each.
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How to Use a Cloudflare Scraper for Data Extraction

Cloudflare protects over 20% of all websites, and its anti-bot system can shut your scraper down in seconds. A Cloudflare scraper is any tool or script that gets past those defenses to pull data from protected sites. This guide breaks down how Cloudflare spots bots, why most scrapers fail, and how to scrape with Decodo's Web Scraping API.

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Wait for Page to Load in Playwright: A Practical Guide to Every Waiting Method

Modern web apps don’t load everything at once, so running scripts too early leads to missed data, broken actions, and flaky results. In this guide, you'll learn how to handle waiting in Playwright, including how it behaves in a headless browser environment, covering auto-waiting, selectors, network events, timeouts, custom conditions, and error handling across dynamic pages.
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undetected_chromedriver: Guide to Avoid Detection Online

Standard Selenium ChromeDriver is blocked by most protected websites in the first few requests. Anti-bot services like Cloudflare, DataDome, and HUMAN (formerly PerimeterX) can detect automation flags, WebDriver properties, and browser fingerprint gaps before the first page finishes loading. The undetected_chromedriver library patches ChromeDriver to reduce these detection signals and works as a drop-in Selenium WebDriver replacement. This guide shows what actually gets flagged, how the patches work, and how to fill the gaps with proxies and behavioral techniques.
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How to Scrape Shopify Stores: Complete Developer Guide

Most Shopify stores have a built-in JSON endpoint for product data: prices, variants, inventory, images. Web scraping Shopify means requesting /products.json, paginating, and getting the catalog as JSON. But the endpoint is limited to 250 products per page, and some merchants disable it. This guide covers both: the JSON approach for stores that have it, and the fallback for stores that don't.
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Browser-use: Step-by-Step AI Browser Automation Guide

Browser-use is a Python library that lets an AI agent control a real browser – navigating dynamic pages, submitting forms, and extracting structured data without brittle selectors. Unlike traditional headless browser setups wired to rigid rules, it reasons with what it sees and adapts. By the end of this guide, you'll have a working agent scraping product data, interacting with web apps, and handling failure scenarios.
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How to Scrape All Text From a Website: Methods, Tools, and Best Practices

Bulk text extraction has become an inseparable part of modern-day existence, with real-world cases including building datasets for LLM training, archiving, content analysis, and RAG systems. However, extracting all text is far more complex than scraping a single page, so we’ve prepared a step-by-step guide to discover pages, extract clean text, remove unnecessary elements, and export structured datasets into proper formats. The tools we use are Python, Beautiful Soup, Playwright, and Decodo proxies.

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