Web Scraping Made Easy: Hands-On with Playwright Codegen

Introduction

Web scraping is a powerful tool for gathering data from websites, but it’s crucial to approach it ethically. Always obtain necessary permissions and respect the website’s terms of service. In this guide, I will walk you through using Playwright’s codegen feature to automate web scraping effortlessly. By the end, you’ll be able to scrape data from any website of your choice.

Playwright's codegen automates everything and generates code as you click, making the process incredibly easy and efficient.

For this tutorial, we will use Books to Scrape, a website designed for web scraping practice. If you want to understand Web scraping in a greater detail, please refer to my earlier article.

Image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E

Prerequisites

Before we start, ensure you have the following installed:

• Python
• Playwright for Python

Step 1: Install Playwright

1. Open your terminal/command line:

• On Windows, you can use Command Prompt or PowerShell.
• On macOS and Linux, you can use the Terminal.