Amazing-Python-Scripts

User Guide: Automated Scraper

This user guide provides step-by-step instructions on how to use the Automated Scraper script in the Amazing-Python-Scripts repository. This script uses the BeautifulSoup library to scrape data from a website and monitor it for changes.

Step 1: Install Dependencies Before you can use the Automated Scraper script, you need to make sure that you have all the necessary dependencies installed. This script requires Python 3 and the BeautifulSoup and requests libraries. To install these dependencies, open a terminal or command prompt and run the following command:

pip install beautifulsoup4 requests

Step 2: Download the Script Next, you need to download the Automated Scraper script from the Amazing-Python-Scripts repository. You can do this by visiting the repository on GitHub and navigating to the Automated_scraper.py directory. From there, you can download the script.py file to your computer.

Step 3: Run the Script Once you have downloaded the script, you can run it by opening a terminal or command prompt, navigating to the directory where you saved the file, and running the following command:

python script.py [URL] [CSS selector] [Interval in minutes]

Replace [URL] with the URL of the website you want to scrape, [CSS selector] with a CSS selector that matches the content you want to monitor, and [Interval in minutes] with the number of minutes between each check for changes.

For example, to scrape data from a website and check for changes every 5 minutes, you would run the following command:

python script.py https://example.com "h1" 5

Step 4: Monitor for Changes After running the script, it will scrape data from the specified website and display it in the terminal. The script will then continue to check for changes at the specified interval and display a message if any changes are detected.

You can stop monitoring for changes at any time by pressing Ctrl + C in the terminal.

You can experiment with different URLs, CSS selectors, and intervals to see how they affect the results.