Why is Python used for web scraping?

In a previous question, I was asking about how to use python for Web Scraping. In the answer to that question, it was specified that python is a great language to use for web scraping since it is very flexible and there are many tools to accomplish data extraction from website. This made me curious ? Python is a great language to program in, but at the end of the day it is not making it to the top of the data extraction game for a simple reason: It's quite slow. At that, if you are executing the spatially aware version of the generic Python interpreter on a single core (or even a multi-core) system such as a Mac or Linux box, it can be quite slow. Speaking of which, this is due to its object-oriented nature -- my first interaction with Python was on SGI-equipped Lynx boxes at the University of Illinois, where I was evaluating the feasibility of web crawling. In the end, we tried CPython, but found it too slow to be efficient in a high-latency environment (and there was no equivalent for C approximately ten years prior to SPARC WorkShop's WebFetch).

So, from a "why" standpoint, the speed of execution of your program is one major factor to consider. The other is the ease-of-use of the language, but this is not a strong argument for the language itself, rather than for its implementation.

There are a few factors that should be investigated here. First, if you're talking about scraping in the general sense of your favorite Web-based databases, as well as image content and things like that, Python is great. IMHO, this also includes Wordpress or Plone-based sites. The reason is that:
It's a really good language to start with. It has a lot of libraries for a lot of things you want, and libraries for libraries. This includes a lot of packages for handling cookies (scrapy).

You'll still have to go through the hoops to get the data that's in JSON into Python.

Is it legal to scrape a website?

This is a question that I've had for a long time. I am not a lawyer, but I'm thinking of starting my own website and would like to learn more about the legality of scraping content from a website.

I understand that the concept of a website is that it has content in it. The content may be text, images, video, and other media. The basic idea is that someone creates the content on the website, and another person can go there and download the content (often called scraping).

Scraping content is the common practice for some types of website. It's also the common practice to access your own data through a third party service, like Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Amazon. These companies collect data and have the data on their websites, which they make available through APIs. It's not always clear whether or not this data should be considered private, but I think it should be.

The website owner has an obvious right to own the content on their website. They also have the right to grant access to their website to whomever they want. They can charge to access the website, or charge for advertising, or offer their content for free.

Scraping content is taking that content away from the website owner. When you use a third party API, you have the right to access the API. But if you scrape the data that is on a third party website, you are taking that data away from that website, and the website owner has no control over the content. The website owner should be able to access their own data, and use it as they wish.

Scraping content is a grey area. If you're not doing this on a large scale, and you're not violating the TOS of the website that you're scraping, then you're probably ok. The website owner will most likely not even know about your scraping. If you're scraping a lot of content, or the website owner finds out, then you may have an issue. If you're scraping content from a public website, like Wikipedia, then you're most likely ok, but you might have to ask your user base, or your website to decide for you.