Python Web Scraping Tutorial (2025)

Overview

This repository turns a full-length article into a practical, GitHub-ready guide.
You’ll scrape the r/programming subreddit using Requests and BeautifulSoup, collect post titles, and analyze which programming languages appear most often.

The tutorial targets old Reddit (https://old.reddit.com) — an easier static HTML interface that doesn’t require JavaScript.

⚠️ Always check a website’s robots.txt and Terms of Service before scraping.
Respect rate limits, add delays, and use a unique User-Agent.

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What Is Web Scraping?

Web scraping means using code to:

1. Fetch the HTML of a webpage, and
2. Extract useful data from it.

Most sites can be scraped with:

• requests – downloads the HTML
• beautifulsoup4 – parses and navigates HTML

For pages that render data dynamically via JavaScript, you’ll need Playwright or Selenium.

Common use cases:

• Market & price tracking
• Research & analytics
• Trend or keyword monitoring

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Why Python?

Python’s ecosystem is the go-to choice for scraping in 2025 because it’s simple, powerful, and well-supported.
Popular libraries include:

Library	Purpose
requests	Fetch HTML from websites
beautifulsoup4	Parse and navigate HTML trees
scrapy	Advanced framework for large projects
playwright	Headless browser automation

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Setup

You’ll need Python 3.9+.

pip install requests beautifulsoup4
# or
pip install -r requirements.txt

Create a file src/scraper.py and follow the examples below.

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Step 1: Fetch HTML

import requests

page = requests.get(
    "https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/",
    headers={'User-agent': 'Learning Python Web Scraping'}
)
html = page.content

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Step 2: Parse the Page

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
p_tags = soup.find_all("p", "title")
titles = [p.find("a").get_text() for p in p_tags]

print(titles)

At this point, you’ll see the post titles from the first page of r/programming.

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Step 3: Scrape Multiple Pages

Old Reddit includes a “Next” button with <span class="next-button">.
We can loop through multiple pages safely:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import time

post_titles = []
next_page = "https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/"

for current_page in range(0, 20):
    page = requests.get(next_page,
                        headers={'User-agent': 'Sorry, learning Python!'})
    html = page.content

    soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
    p_tags = soup.find_all("p", "title")
    titles = [p.find("a").get_text() for p in p_tags]

    post_titles += titles
    next_page = soup.find("span", "next-button").find("a")['href']
    time.sleep(3)

print(post_titles)

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Step 4: Analyze the Data

Let’s count mentions of popular programming languages:

language_counter = {
    "javascript": 0, "html": 0, "css": 0, "sql": 0, "python": 0, "typescript": 0,
    "java": 0, "c#": 0, "c++": 0, "php": 0, "c": 0, "powershell": 0,
    "go": 0, "rust": 0, "kotlin": 0, "dart": 0, "ruby": 0
}

words = []
for title in post_titles:
    words += [word.lower() for word in title.split()]

for word in words:
    for key in language_counter:
        if word == key:
            language_counter[key] += 1

print(language_counter)

Example output:

{'javascript': 20, 'html': 6, 'css': 10, 'sql': 0, 'python': 26, 'typescript': 1,
 'java': 10, 'c#': 5, 'c++': 10, 'php': 1, 'c': 10, 'powershell': 0,
 'go': 5, 'rust': 7, 'kotlin': 3, 'dart': 0, 'ruby': 1}

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Step 5: Optional — Use Proxies

To avoid rate limits or bans, route requests through a proxy provider such as IPRoyal.

PROXIES = {
    "http":  "http://youruser:[email protected]:22323",
    "https": "http://youruser:[email protected]:22323",
}

page = requests.get(next_page,
                    headers={'User-agent': 'Just learning Python, sorry!'},
                    proxies=PROXIES)

Proxies allow rotation between IPs, making traffic look more natural and reducing blocks.

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Summary

You now know how to:

1. Fetch and parse HTML with Requests and BeautifulSoup
2. Scrape multiple pages safely
3. Count language mentions from Reddit titles
4. Optionally add proxy support for stability

For larger or dynamic projects, explore Scrapy or Playwright.

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🐍 Happy Scraping!