{"id":6426,"date":"2023-10-18T14:47:43","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T14:47:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/royadata.io\/blog\/?p=6426"},"modified":"2023-10-18T14:47:43","modified_gmt":"2023-10-18T14:47:43","slug":"quora-scraper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/royadata.io\/blog\/quora-scraper\/","title":{"rendered":"Quora Scraper 101: How to scrape Quora answers with Python"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Scraping Quora answers is incredibly easy with the right guide. In this article, you will be learning about the best Quora scraping tools in the market and how to create your own Quora scraper as a coder.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Quora\n<\/picture>\n

Quora is an incredibly useful web service that is meant for posting and answering questions about almost anything, and everything provided the question makes sense and is not spammy. It might interest you to know that Quora gets as many as 4 million questions posted on the platform daily.<\/p>\n

This is some big data you can use as a marketer. Depending on the aspect of Internet marketing you have an interest in, the questions and answers posted on the community-driven question and answer platform can help in your Internet marketing research. A good number of marketers and social researchers are interested in the questions and answers on Quora.<\/p>\n

However, extracting those questions and answers is not easy. While they are publicly available, you will find it difficult and tiring to collect them manually, especially if you want to extract data from many pages on the website. To make things worse, Quora does not have an API you can call in other to extract questions and answer.<\/p>\n

This means that if you are interested in extracting data from Quora, then you will have to do that yourself. The easiest way to extract questions, answers, and other content from Quora is via web scraping through the use of a web scraper.<\/p>\n\n

<\/span>Quora Scraping \u2013 an Overview<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

From the above, you already know that Quora will not provide you their content in bulk, and you will have to get it yourself via web scraping<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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So, what is web scraping? Web scraping is the technique of using computer programs to automatically extract data publicly available on the Internet.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These computer programs are bots that operate in an automated and repetitive manner, sending many requests in a short period of time. How web scrapers work is simple, they send HTTP requests as browsers do, get the page source (usually in HTML) as a response from the web server, then parse out the required data to either save in a database or use it for making a decision in the program.<\/p>\n

For Quora, the process is still the same. All that a Quora scraper requires is to send a get request to the URL with the question and answers he wants to scrape; Quora will send the page as it would to web browsers. Unlike web browsers that would render the page, a Quora scraper would parse out required data.<\/p>\n

However, there is something you need to be aware of when it comes to scraping Quora. Quora will not allow you to scrape many pages without a fight. It has an anti-bot system that will block your scraper after a few requests. While the anti-bot system the anti-bot system can effectively put away bots developed by amateurs, it is not effective against experience web scrapers<\/a> that can bypass it.<\/p>\n

There are basically 3 ways you can extract data from Quora and use it for your research project. The first method is the most expensive, and we won\u2019t be talking about it much \u2013 making use of a data service that will scrape on your behalf. The other two methods which would be discussed in this article is using an already-made web scraper or developing one yourself.<\/p>\n

If you have coding skills, you can go ahead and create your own it will only take a few hours at most, depending on the features you want to be included and how rigid and robust you want it. However, you do not have coding skills; you can make use of the ones already in the market.<\/p>\n\n

<\/span>How to Scrape Quora Using Python<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

One advantage of being a coder is that you can develop your own web scraper tailored to your specific need. You can have as many features as you want in the scraper you develop.<\/p>\n

While you can develop scraper using any Turing complete programming language, the Python programming language is the most popular programming language for developing web bots. As such, we will be using Python to demonstrate to you how to scrape Quora easily. The libraries we will be using include the Requests library for sending HTTP requests and BeautifulSoup for parsing.<\/p>\n

The process of scraping Quora is simple, use the Requests module to send requests to the URL of the question you need to scrape its answers. When a valid response is returned, you can use BeautifulSoup for parsing out the questions and associated answers.<\/p>\n

You might need to make use of proxies to bypass IP tracking and block. But in the example below, we are not using any proxy as the code is just a proof of concept. The code will print the question and answer if you provide it a URL to a question.<\/p>\n

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup\n\nimport requests\n\nheaders = {'User-Agent':'Mozilla\/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit\/601.3.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version\/9.0.2 Safari\/601.3.9'}\n\nurl = \"https:\/\/www.quora.com\/What-is-the-future-of-Donald-Trump\"\n\npage_source = requests.get(url, headers=headers)\n\nsoup = BeautifulSoup(page_source.content, \"html.parser\")\n\nquestion = soup.find(\"div\", {\"class\": \"puppeteer_test_question_title\"}).text\n\nprint(question)\n\n#scrape answers by looping through\n\nanswers = soup.find_all(\"div\", attrs={\"lass\": \"ui_qtext_expanded\"})\n\nfor answer in answers:\n\n    answer = answer.text\n\n    print(answer)\n\n<\/pre>\n