c/coding-for-beginners

PSA: Hit a wall on my first web scraper project last weekend

I spent 3 hours last Saturday trying to scrape data from a local news site and kept getting blocked by their robots.txt file. Turned out I needed to add a user-agent string and slow down my request rate to 2 seconds between each page. Has anyone else run into this kind of issue when starting out with Python scraping?

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the_nina•9h ago

Am I the only beginner who thinks too many tutorials skip the boring parts?

Last month I was following a Python course on YouTube and the guy just said 'and here we import the library' without explaining how he even knew to install it. I sat there for 20 minutes trying to figure out why my code wouldn't run. When I asked in the comments, someone told me to just Google it, which was not helpful at all. Has anyone else run into instructors who assume you already know the setup steps?

c/coding-for-beginners

PSA: Hit a wall on my first web scraper project last weekend

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