Simple Scraper (Books to Scrape)

A tiny beginner-friendly web scraping project using requests + BeautifulSoup. Targets the demo website books.toscrape.com (made for scraping practice).

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Preview (Excel)

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Features

• Scrapes book title, price (raw + numeric), stock text, URL
• Pagination (choose number of pages)
• Optional price filter (--max-price 25)
• CSV output

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Requirements

• Python 3.10+ (works with 3.8/3.9 if you replace float | None with Optional[float])
• requests, beautifulsoup4, lxml

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Install

python -m venv .venv
# Windows
.\.venv\Scripts\activate
# macOS/Linux
source .venv/bin/activate

pip install -r requirements.txt

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Usage

python scrape_books.py

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Options

python scrape_books.py \
  --pages 3 \            # how many pages to scrape (default: 3)
  --max-price 25 \       # keep only books <= £25 (omit to disable)
  --out cheap_books.csv \# output filename (default: books.csv)
  --delay 1.0 \          # seconds between pages (default: 1.0)
  --start-url https://books.toscrape.com/catalogue/page-1.html

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Output

CSV with columns: title, price_raw, price_value, stock, url

Example:

Page 1: 20 rows
Page 2: 20 rows
Page 3: 20 rows
Saved 60 rows to books.csv

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Notes (ethics & safety)

• This project targets a demo site explicitly built for scraping practice.
• Always be polite: keep a small delay between requests (--delay).
• Do not scrape personal data or violate sites’ robots.txt / Terms of Service.

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License

This project is released under the MIT License

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Author

Developed by Marcos Vinicius Thibes Kemer

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