Data Parsing: The Basic, the Easy, and the Difficult | OxyCast #3

Let’s talk selectors

Those who’ve ever tried digging deeper into the process of parsing probably know about the essential role of selectors in locating and selecting the needed elements from an HTML code. 

Thus, in order to give you a deeper understanding of these tools, the third episode of OxyCast focuses on providing extensive answers to the following questions:

• What is a selector?

• What is the difference between CSS and XPath selectors?

• How to choose the right selector?

• How to write a good selector?

What does the future hold for parsing?

As a finishing note, Augustinas Kalvis and Povilas Kudriavcevas briefly talk about the future of parsing. So, to heighten your excitement a little bit, here’s a sneak peek of Povilas’ thoughts on what we could expect from parsing in the coming years:

To sum up

We hope this episode will be insightful for you because apart from covering all the mentioned topics, our experts will also shine light on such things as parser failures, tests, and duties. So, get ready to acquire a lot of valuable information and implement it in your future public web scraping activities. Additionally, you can check out this practical Python data parsing tutorial.

And while we aim at exploring the most in-demand web scraping topics in our podcast, you can always propose topics or ask questions by contacting us at events@oxylabs.io. We’ll try our best to cover your ideas in future OxyCast episodes.