How To Use ChatGPT To Automate Web Scraping
The process of gathering data from websites using automated scripts is known as Web Scraping. ChatGPT a powerful language model developed by OpenAI.
The process of gathering data from websites using automated scripts is known as Web Scraping. ChatGPT, a powerful language model developed by OpenAI, has the ability to generate code for web scraping. Let’s explore how this works…
IMDb is a go-to source for information on movies, TV shows, and various forms of entertainment. It features a chart of the top-rated movies, with the top 250 movies listed on https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/?ref_=nv_mv_250. This chart includes details such as the title, cast, director, and IMDb rating of each movie.
lets we want to use web scraping to pull movie information with python and the beautiful soup library from this website. we would suggest Chatgpt
is a powerful tool to help us to create needed code, let’s use Chatgpt to implement this task by following the request.
“Web scrape https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/?ref_=nv_mv_250 with Python and BeautifulSoup”
Chatgpt is response specific implementation step by step and the source code in python below
then, that is already a good result and assists us in fully understanding how the code source is doing its task, however, we need to have the execution in one file, so we only need to copy and paste, we going to ask Chatgpt again to provide the python web scripting in just one file:
Please provide the code in one file.
Good ChatGPT is replying with the full and complete source code as you can see below:
you can see the complete Python source code which was generated by ChatGPT:
Let’s test if the source code is working as we expected. Therefore, first, we need to create a new file:
And then we need to copy and paste the code into webscrape.py:
Let’s start the python by writing the following command on the Terminal line
The script is working and after a few seconds, you can see that a new file imdb_top_movies.cvs has been created and is including the extracted movie information in CSV format.
ChatGPT has generated a web scraping which is working out of the box. No need to adapt the code manually. That’s a good result.
In our original request to ChatGPT, we have not specified which movie information needs to be extracted from the website. ChatGPT decided to pull the movie name and the year of publication. Let's say we would like to also include the rating. write the following into ChatGPT:
Also retrieve the IMDb rating for each film
ChatGPT provides you with detailed instructions and code snippets for changing the existing code to also include and extract the rating information:
We could now ask ChatGPT again to incorporate these changes into the script:
Please give me the full code in one with, with the try-except block
then Chatgpt will be generating the complete Python script again, including the changes for pulling the additional information from the website:
Conclusion
The tutorial demonstrated that ChatGPT is an effective tool for generating scripts for web scraping. By simply providing our basic requirements to ChatGPT, we received a ready-to-run Python script, making the process of web scraping much easier and allowing us to start quickly without the need for any modifications.