# Web Scraping (Data Science & ML)

> BeautifulSoup, requests, HTML parsing, XPath, CSS selectors, APIs, pagination, best practices

- 18 interview questions
- Mid-Level
- [Interview Questions: Data Science & ML](https://sharpskill.dev/en/technologies/data-science/interview-questions.md)

## 1. Which Python library is typically used to make HTTP requests before parsing HTML content?

**Answer**

The requests library is the standard in Python for making HTTP requests in a simple and intuitive way. It allows performing GET, POST and other HTTP verbs with a clear API. BeautifulSoup does not make HTTP requests, it only parses HTML once retrieved.

## 2. What is the main role of BeautifulSoup in a web scraping project?

**Answer**

BeautifulSoup is an HTML/XML parsing library that allows navigating, searching and extracting data from an HTML document. It creates a document tree that makes it easy to search for elements using methods like find() and find_all(). It does not make HTTP requests.

## 3. Which BeautifulSoup method finds all elements matching a given criteria?

**Answer**

The find_all() method returns a list of all elements matching the specified criteria (tag, attributes, class, etc.). The find() method only returns the first matching element. select() uses CSS selectors and select_one() returns a single element with a CSS selector.

## 15 more questions available

- How to specify a custom User-Agent header when making a request with requests?
- Which attribute of the Response object returns the HTML content as text?

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