HTML Structure for Scraping

Before scraping, you must understand how web pages are built.

Web pages are written in HTML.
Scraping means reading this structure and picking what you need.

Why HTML knowledge is critical

If you don't understand:

• tags
• nesting
• attributes
  you will not know where your data lives.

Basic HTML example

<div class="product">
  <h2 class="title">Laptop</h2>
  <span class="price">$900</span>
</div>

Here:

• div wraps a product
• h2 has the name
• span has the price

Tree structure of HTML

HTML is a tree, not flat text.

flowchart TD
  A[div.product] --> B[h2.title]
  A --> C[span.price]

How scraper sees this

You search:

• tag name
• class
• id
• path

Example with BeautifulSoup:

product = soup.find("div", class_="product")
title = product.find("h2", class_="title").text
price = product.find("span", class_="price").text

Key idea

You are not scraping a page.
You are navigating a tree.

Remember

• Always inspect HTML first
• Identify container blocks
• Then target child elements