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 ```html <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.

```mermaid 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: ```python 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