How we learnt to stop worrying and love web scraping
I admit being a bit disappointed that a well-known disadvantage of web scraping was not mentioned: Web scraping is fragile!<p>Web sites change, web frameworks evolve, and just some subtle reordering of some <divs> or renaming of CSS classes, and your perfect scraping code from yesterday will break tomorrow -- maybe not leaving you empty-handed, but probably missing some data or delivering the wrong one.<p>If there is an API you can use, use it. If your budget allows to pay for API access, buy it. APIs tend to be more stable than scraping, and the data provider will probably inform you if it changes. Contacting them might even get you more interesting data, as not every column they have in their database might become published on the web site.