HTML Scraping: Extracting Specific Text and Tags

Scrape specified text from a webpage and print text from the first 10 `<a>` tags.

Gain practical experience in web scraping by tackling two coding challenges designed to extract specific text and HTML tag data. Strengthen your programming capabilities by practicing targeted scraping techniques.

Key Insights

  • The first coding challenge requires participants to programmatically locate and extract specific text content from a provided webpage.
  • The second challenge involves retrieving and printing text from the first 10 anchor (a) tags on a page, emphasizing precision to avoid excessive data (hundreds of tags).
  • Participants apply hands-on web scraping methods, reinforcing their skills in targeted HTML data extraction practices.

Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.

Let's give you a couple of challenges here. The first challenge is finding this text somewhere on the page we’ve given you—scrape it, and print out the text from the tag that contains it. It will actually be just this text. Print it out, scrape it programmatically, and get it into your code output.

The second challenge is to find all `` tags on the page and print the text for the first 10. I want to stress this—if you try to print all of them, it will result in hundreds—maybe even thousands—of entries. So just print the text from the first 10 `` tags on the page.

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All right, those are your two challenges. I'll let you folks go at it.

Colin Jaffe

Colin Jaffe is a programmer, writer, and teacher with a passion for creative code, customizable computing environments, and simple puns. He loves teaching code, from the fundamentals of algorithmic thinking to the business logic and user flow of application building—he particularly enjoys teaching JavaScript, Python, API design, and front-end frameworks.

Colin has taught code to a diverse group of students since learning to code himself, including young men of color at All-Star Code, elementary school kids at The Coding Space, and marginalized groups at Pursuit. He also works as an instructor for Noble Desktop, where he teaches classes in the Full-Stack Web Development Certificate and the Data Science & AI Certificate.

Colin lives in Brooklyn with his wife, two kids, and many intricate board games.

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