Extracting author names and publication dates from blog articles

Gayane Ali · 2024-12-18T08:00:17+00:00

Scraping author names and publication dates from blog articles can help in content analysis or research. Blogs typically organize this metadata near the article title or at the end of the post. Using Python’s BeautifulSoup, you can extract these elements by targeting their specific tags and classes. For dynamically loaded blogs, Puppeteer or Selenium can help render the page and access these elements. Additionally, some blogs provide RSS feeds that already structure author names and publication dates in XML format, which can be parsed easily.Here’s an example using BeautifulSoup for static content:import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoupurl "https://example.com/blogs"headers {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"}response requests.get(url, headersheaders)if response.status_code 200: soup BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html.parser") articles soup.find_all("div", class_"blog-article") for article in articles: title article.find("h2", class_"blog-title").text.strip() author article.find("span", class_"author-name").text.strip() date article.find("span", class_"publish-date").text.strip() print(f"Title: {title}, Author: {author}, Date: {date}")else: print("Failed to fetch blog articles.")If the site uses JavaScript to load articles dynamically, Puppeteer can interact with the DOM to extract the required data. Respecting rate limits and using caching for large-scale blog scraping are key to avoiding blocks. How do you handle websites with inconsistent article metadata?

General Web Scraping

Extracting author names and publication dates from blog articles

Posted by Gayane Ali on 12/18/2024 at 8:00 am
Scraping author names and publication dates from blog articles can help in content analysis or research. Blogs typically organize this metadata near the article title or at the end of the post. Using Python’s BeautifulSoup, you can extract these elements by targeting their specific tags and classes. For dynamically loaded blogs, Puppeteer or Selenium can help render the page and access these elements. Additionally, some blogs provide RSS feeds that already structure author names and publication dates in XML format, which can be parsed easily.
Here’s an example using BeautifulSoup for static content:
```
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "https://example.com/blogs"
headers = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"}
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
if response.status_code == 200:
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html.parser")
    articles = soup.find_all("div", class_="blog-article")
    for article in articles:
        title = article.find("h2", class_="blog-title").text.strip()
        author = article.find("span", class_="author-name").text.strip()
        date = article.find("span", class_="publish-date").text.strip()
        print(f"Title: {title}, Author: {author}, Date: {date}")
else:
    print("Failed to fetch blog articles.")
```
If the site uses JavaScript to load articles dynamically, Puppeteer can interact with the DOM to extract the required data. Respecting rate limits and using caching for large-scale blog scraping are key to avoiding blocks. How do you handle websites with inconsistent article metadata?
Gayane Ali replied 4 days, 10 hours ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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