In this article, we’ll be showing how to scrape websites, leveraging both these tools to scrape the popular gaming website Steam<\/a>, extracting the titles of its top-selling games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Replit<\/a> is a user-friendly online coding environment, perfect for beginners and seasoned coders alike. ChatGPT<\/a> is a sophisticated AI developed by OpenAI that can understand and generate human-like text. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This step-by-step guide is designed to make the process easy to understand and follow. We’ll be demystifying each step, explaining the reasoning behind it, and ensuring you have all the information you need to conduct your own web scraping projects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether you’re seeking to scrape data for personal interest, to gain insights, or to fuel business decisions, this guide will equip you with the necessary skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So let’s dive right in and explore the fascinating world of web scraping with AI!<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re not already a programmer, scraping a website can seem to be a daunting task. But by harnessing ChatGPT and Replit, the process is surprisingly simple! To illustrate this, we’ll go step by step through the process, in this case using GPT4 and Replit to scrape the titles list of the top sellers on the Steam Store webpage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You should be able to apply this process to essentially any website you want to scrape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before we get started with the hands-on aspect of web scraping, it’s essential to make sure we’re all on the same page with the terms we’ll be using throughout this guide. Even if you have some familiarity with these concepts, a quick refresher can’t hurt!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is a field of computer science that focuses on creating systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. These tasks include understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, and making decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One exciting development in AI is ChatGPT, a model developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT is an LLM<\/a> that uses a technique called machine learning, where it learns patterns from large amounts of text data. This learning process allows it to generate human-like text that’s contextually relevant to the input it’s given. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In this guide, we’ll be using ChatGPT 4 to help us with our web scraping project. That said, you should still be able to accomplish all these tasks if you’re using the free GPT3.5 version as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Web scraping is a method used to extract data from websites. It involves making a request to a website (like asking the website to show its contents to you), then parsing the HTML of that site to find and extract the data you’re interested in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Web scraping can be a powerful tool for gathering data, but it’s important to note that you should always respect the website’s terms of service and only scrape public data<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Replit is an online coding platform. What makes Replit so great, especially for beginners, is its simplicity and convenience. You don’t need to install anything on your computer to use it – everything happens directly in your web browser. It supports many programming languages, including Python, which we’ll be using for our web scraping project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that we’ve defined our key terms, we’re ready to dive into the practical side of things. In the next section, we’ll show you how to get started with Replit and set up your first Python project. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that we’re familiar with the terms we’ll be using, let’s dive into the practical side of things. The first step is to set up an account on Replit. Here’s how you can do it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before we start coding, let’s familiarize ourselves with the Replit interface:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that you have your account set up and are familiar with the interface, let’s create your first Python project:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Congratulations, you’ve just set up your Replit account and created your first Python project! In the next section, we’ll introduce ChatGPT in more detail and set up the OpenAI API in Replit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We assume that you’re already familiar with ChatGPT, but there are a few things we should touch on regarding this particular task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is an AI language model known for its ability to generate human-like text. It understands context and can respond to prompts with relevant information. For our web scraping project, ChatGPT can be an invaluable assistant, providing insights and generating code snippets to help us interact with the data we scrape from the Steam website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s important to understand that while ChatGPT’s responses can be incredibly accurate and human-like, it doesn’t comprehend text like a human. Instead, it predicts responses based on patterns it learned during its training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are two main ways to access ChatGPT’s assistance:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each method has its own advantages. Using the API provides a more integrated experience, but switching between browser windows is a straightforward and accessible way to leverage ChatGPT’s capabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the next section, we’ll dive into setting up your Replit environment for web scraping and interacting with ChatGPT. Whether you’re using the API or switching between browser windows, the adventure is just beginning!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that we’re familiar with ChatGPT and how to access it, let’s set up our Replit environment for this particular web scraping project. Regardless of how you’re accessing ChatGPT, you’ll need to prepare your Replit environment the same way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In order to scrape with ChatGPT, I had to ask ChatGPT how to do it! It explained that I needed to use two libraries: Remember that it’s always a good idea to chat<\/em> with ChatGPT, ask it questions, ask it to elaborate, and when something goes wrong, ask how to fix it. Unless you’re not already a programmer, get used to doing this when working with ChatGPT on anything coding-related.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember that it’s always a good idea to chat<\/em> with ChatGPT, ask it questions, ask it to elaborate, and when something goes wrong, ask how to fix it. Unless you’re not already a programmer, get used to doing this when working with ChatGPT on anything coding-related.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Now let’s explain what To install these libraries, you go to the Packages icon on Replit, and search for both “Requests” and “BeautifulSoup”. Install the most recent version of each of them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Then add the following lines of code at the top of our Replit Python file:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Again, I had no idea that I had to do this. Through discussion with ChatGPT, I learned these steps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re using the OpenAI API to interact with ChatGPT, you’ll need to install the You’ll also need to set your OpenAI API key. You can do this by adding the following line:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Replace If you’re switching between browser windows, you don’t need to worry about setting up an API key.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that we’ve prepared our environment, it’s time to start the actual web scraping process. Our first step is to send a request to the website we want to scrape. In this guide, we’ll be scraping the top sellers page of the Steam website<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before we can extract data from a webpage, we need to know where that data is located within the page’s HTML. The Google Chrome browser has a handy set of Developer Tools that can help us with this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To open the Developer Tools, right-click anywhere on the webpage and select “Inspect” from the context menu. This will open a panel on the right side of your browser displaying the HTML of the webpage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The panel has two main parts: the HTML viewer on the left, and the CSS and JavaScript viewer on the right. For our purposes, we’ll be focusing on the HTML viewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can navigate through the HTML by clicking on the arrow icons next to the HTML tags. When you hover over an HTML element in the Developer Tools, the corresponding part of the webpage will be highlighted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our case, we’re interested in the titles of the top selling games on Steam. To find the HTML tag and class for the titles, follow these steps:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that we know the tag and class for the game titles, we can use this information to extract the titles in the next section. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In web scraping, this process of finding the correct HTML elements is often one of the most time-consuming parts, but it’s also one of the most crucial. Good job on getting through it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I asked ChatGPT to provide the scraping code, using the BeautifulSoup and requests libraries. ChatGPT responded with the following code block, telling me to place the code in the main.py file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Click on the RUN button on the top of Replit, and (assuming all went well) you should get an output that looks something like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Hooray, it worked! If you get an error, simply copy the error into ChatGPT and ask how to fix the error. It may take a couple of iterations, but with a little perseverence, you’ll get it done (see below for more details on troubleshooting).<\/p>\n\n\n\n And with that, you’ve successfully scraped the titles of the top selling games on the Steam website! This is a big milestone in your web scraping journey. In the next section, we’ll discuss some of the challenges and considerations when web scraping. So stay tuned, we’re not done yet!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Web scraping is a powerful tool, but it’s not without its challenges and ethical considerations. In this section, we’ll discuss some of the common limitations you might encounter when scraping websites, as well as the ethical guidelines you should follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Web scraping is a potent tool that can unlock a lot of data on the internet. However, it’s important to understand its limitations and use it responsibly. Always respect the rules of the site you’re scraping and the privacy of individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coding is often a process of solving one problem after another, and web scraping is no exception. You’ll likely encounter issues and errors that you’ll need to troubleshoot. Luckily, ChatGPT can be an invaluable assistant in this process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re stuck on a problem or not sure how to proceed, you can ask ChatGPT for help. Simply describe your problem or question in as much detail as possible, and ChatGPT will generate a response. Copy any errors that show up in your developer console.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, if you’re getting an error message when you try to send a request to a website, you could ask ChatGPT, “I’m getting a 403 error when I try to send a GET request to a website with the requests library in Python. What does this mean and how can I fix it?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n ChatGPT will understand your prompt and provide a response, explaining what a 403 error is and suggesting ways to fix it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ChatGPT can also generate code snippets that you can use in your project. For instance, you could ask, “How do I extract all the links from a webpage with BeautifulSoup in Python?” and ChatGPT will provide a code snippet showing how to do this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember, ChatGPT is here to assist you. Don’t hesitate to ask for help when you need it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Congratulations! You’ve journeyed through the process of setting up your environment in Replit, sending your first web request, parsing a webpage with BeautifulSoup, extracting data, and even troubleshooting with ChatGPT. You’ve taken a significant step into the world of web scraping and automated data extraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But this is just the beginning. Here are some potential next steps for you to consider:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1. Experiment with Other Websites<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Try scraping data from other websites. Each site is unique, and scraping different sites will give you a broader understanding of how web scraping works. Remember, always respect a website’s robots.txt file and avoid overloading the server.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. Learn More About BeautifulSoup<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n BeautifulSoup is a powerful library with many more features than we’ve covered here. You can learn more from the official BeautifulSoup documentation<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. Explore Other Python Libraries for Web Scraping<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There are other Python libraries for web scraping that you might find useful, such as Scrapy or Selenium. Each library has its strengths and weaknesses, so experiment and find what works best for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4. Keep Asking Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue using ChatGPT as a resource for learning and troubleshooting. The more specific and detailed your questions, the better ChatGPT can assist you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 5. Check Out LangChain<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n LangChain<\/a> is a powerful Python-based tool that can tie AI chatbots to various traditional applications like Google Drive, various websites, etc. It’s like an API on steroids, and is worth checking out<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Web scraping is a powerful tool in the world of data analysis, and you’ve taken the first steps towards mastering it. Whether you want to track prices on e-commerce sites, monitor news articles, or analyze trends on social media, the skills you’ve learned here will serve you well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember, learning to code and web scrape is a journey, full of challenges and rewards. Don’t be discouraged by the obstacles you encounter. Keep experimenting, keep learning, and most importantly, keep having fun. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Good luck on your web scraping adventures!<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you want to get more ambitious and try using ChatGPT as your own personal software developer, see this article:<\/p>\n\n\n\n How I Used ChatGPT to Develop a Web App Without Coding Skills<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHow to Scrape Websites with ChatGPT and Replit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Defining Key Terms<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Web Scraping<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Replit<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nGetting Started with Replit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Setting up an Account on Replit<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
Understanding the Replit Interface<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
Creating Your First Python Project on Replit<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n\n\n\nChatGPT 101<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Accessing ChatGPT<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n\n\n\nSetting Up Your Replit Environment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
requests<\/code> and BeautifulSoup<\/code>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
requests<\/code> and BeautifulSoup<\/code> are, and how to use them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
requests<\/code>: This library allows us to send HTTP requests. We’ll use it to request the web page that we want to scrape.<\/li>\n\n\n\nBeautifulSoup<\/code>: This library is used for parsing HTML and XML documents. It creates parse trees that are helpful to extract the data easily.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\nimport requests\nfrom bs4 import BeautifulSoup<\/code>\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nSetting Up Interaction with ChatGPT<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
openai<\/code> Python library. You can do this by adding the following line to the top of your Python file:<\/p>\n\n\n\nimport openai\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nopenai.api_key = 'your-api-key'\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n'your-api-key'<\/code> with the actual key you received from OpenAI. Be careful to keep this key secret, as anyone who has it can use your OpenAI account!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nSending Your First Web Scraping Request<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Using Chrome Developer Tools to Identify HTML Elements<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
div<\/code> and the class name is title<\/code>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/aiforfolks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/title-class-and-tag-1024x634.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nAsk ChatGPT for the scraping code<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
import requests \nfrom bs4 import BeautifulSoup \n# URL to scrape \nurl = \"https:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/search\/?filter=topsellers\" \n# use requests to fetch the URL \nresponse = requests.get(url) \n# parse the content with BeautifulSoup \nsoup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser') \n# find all the span tags with the class 'title' \ntags = soup.find_all('span', class_='title') \n# create a list to hold the game titles \ngame_titles = [] \n# iterate over each tag \nfor tag in tags: \n# get the text inside this tag and add it to the list \ngame_titles.append(tag.text) \n# print out the game titles \nfor title in game_titles: print(title)<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Street Fighter\u2122 6
Steam Deck
Destiny 2
The Outlast Trials
Call of Duty\u00ae: Modern Warfare\u00ae II
Red Dead Redemption 2
The Elder Scrolls\u00ae Online
Starship Troopers: Extermination
System Shock
Rust
Apex Legends\u2122
War Thunder
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six\u00ae Siege
Grand Theft Auto V
Gunfire Reborn
Lost Ark
Warframe
NBA 2K23
Arma 3
STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor\u2122
Cities: Skylines
The Sims\u2122 4
Dead by Daylight
Valve Index\u00ae Headset
Sniper Elite 5
Hogwarts Legacy
ELDEN RING
FINAL FANTASY XIV Online
Friends vs Friends
Sons Of The Forest
Marvel\u2019s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Destiny 2: Lightfall
Marvel\u2019s Spider-Man Remastered
Gunfire Reborn – Artisan and Magician
EA SPORTS\u2122 FIFA 23
Crusader Kings III
Ready or Not
MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM BATTLE OPERATION 2
Call of Duty\u00ae: Black Ops III
Project Zomboid
Team Fortress 2
SMITE\u00ae
Stellaris
Travellers Rest
Sea of Thieves 2023 Edition
Hunt: Showdown
Black Desert
The Elder Scrolls Online: Necrom
Hi-Fi RUSH<\/p>\n\n\n\nCongratulations!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nUnderstanding the Limitations and Ethics of Web Scraping<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Limitations<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
Ethics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n\n\n\nLeveraging ChatGPT for Troubleshooting<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Asking ChatGPT for Help<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Asking for Code Snippets<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nWrapping Up and Next Steps<\/h2>\n\n\n\n