Mastering Web Scraping in Python: Crawling from Scratch
Is there a reason, other than the BeautifulSoup library, that Python is considered by many to be the ideal language for web scraping?  I would think that JavaScript would be a far better choice since it could natively parse scripts on the page and libraries for querying and parsing the DOM have existed for a long time in JavaScript and are well known (to the point of being boring -- eg: jQuery).