Saving Scraped Data

Scraping is useless if you don’t save data.

Your goal is not just to print results, but to:

• store them
• reuse later
• analyze
• share

Why saving matters

If you scrape:

• today: 100 products
• tomorrow: prices change

You want history.

Common formats

• CSV: simple tables (Excel friendly)
• JSON: structured/nested data (APIs, configs)

---

Save to CSV

CSV = comma separated values.

import csv

data = [
  ["Name", "Price"],
  ["Apple", 120],
  ["Banana", 80],
]

with open("products.csv", "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f)
    writer.writerows(data)

You can open this file in Excel.

---

Save scraped data to CSV

import requests, csv
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

res = requests.get("https://example.com")
soup = BeautifulSoup(res.text, "html.parser")

rows = []
rows.append(["Text", "Link"])

for a in soup.find_all("a"):
    rows.append([a.text.strip(), a.get("href")])

with open("links.csv", "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f)
    writer.writerows(rows)

---

Save to JSON

JSON is great for nested data.

import json

data = [
  {"name": "Apple", "price": 120},
  {"name": "Banana", "price": 80}
]

with open("products.json", "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    json.dump(data, f, indent=2)

---

Graph: scraping to storage

flowchart LR
  A[Scraper] --> B[Extracted Data]
  B --> C[CSV File]
  B --> D[JSON File]

Remember

• Always save data, not just print
• CSV for tables
• JSON for structured data
• Use utf-8 encoding