To determine the current date and time at the displayed location, we will need to know the location's timezone.

To find out which of these two it is, we will first have to determine the current date and time at the location, and then possibly adjust it by one day based on whether the date matches the first displayed day. This means that the first displayed day can either represent the current date at the location, or the day before the current date. But what happens when we view a location where the current time is between midnight and 5 AM? Trying that, we can see that, in the day represented by Tonight, there are only a few slots for the hours between midnight and 5 AM displayed. Looking more closely at the BBC Weather page, we can see that it shows the forecast for each day from 6:00 AM to 5:00 AM the next day. If we hover over the days in the displayed carousel, we can see that the link for each day leads to an URL ending with /day. The page shows the weather forecast for the upcoming 14 days. Opening a different location changes only that number in the URL, confirming our assumptions.

If we open the BBC Weather page and search for Prague, we can see that it opened a page with a URL ending in a seven-digit number, which we can assume is the ID of the displayed location BBC Weather uses internally. Understanding the URL formatįirst, we need to look around the BBC Weather page and understand how the weather data is being retrieved and presented. To do that, we will scrape the weather forecast for each of our options, and then compare the results. We're choosing between Prague, New York, and Honolulu, and we will pick the destination based on which one has the best weather. Let's say we want to decide on our next holiday destination. Exploring the BBC Weather pageīBC Weather offers you the weather forecast for the upcoming 14 days for a large selection of places around the world. In a rush? Skip this tutorial and get the full code example. We also have an accompanying tutorial for how to process the scraped data using Pandas. This tutorial shows you how to write a Python actor for scraping the weather forecast from BBC Weather. One of those is Beautiful Soup, a library for parsing HTML and easy navigation or modification of a DOM tree. The Python ecosystem contains some pretty powerful scraping tools as well.

Web scraping is not limited to the JavaScript world. Follow the tutorial to analyze the target page and create a Python actor. Learn how to scrape websites using Python and its Beautiful Soup library. How to scrape data in Python using Beautiful Soup

Easy weather website to scrape data