Python for Data Science
Web Scraping Using Python and BeautifulSoup
Scraping data from FIFA.com in 4 Simple Steps
Update 26.02.2020 — FIFA somehow removed total data of the 2018 World Cup making this blog just for reference purposes. If I find the link of the archive somewhere, I’ll post it just under this. Apologies for the inconvenience in advance.
Most people think data science is about cool machine learning algorithms and self-driving cars. Let me tell you something, it’s not. Almost 80% of the time you are searching and cleaning the data, and if successful, remaining 20% in those cool stuff you see upfront.
“Find data and play with it” is the most repeated advice a new-comer in data science gets. I am sure you have read it somewhere too, right? But, what if you really want to work on some project but the data you want is not there on the internet? No one is teaching what will you do then, do they?
Data that you are going to need might not always be there in plain sight. But the good news is, it is there. Hidden in the web pages. You just have to crawl through those pages to extract it. That’s what Web Scraping is. And today, we are going to build a web scraper using Python and BeautifulSoup (a library) to scrape data of FIFA World Cup 2018. The data includes an…