The Great Encyclopedia

Project codes are available at Github

The Great Encyclopedia web app is a Flask application that allows users to search for entries on Wikipedia and display relevant information, including the entry title, image and text content. Users can submit search queries, and the app fetches and parses data from Wikipedia using the BeautifulSoup library. The parsed information is then displayed to the user through a clean and user-friendly interface.

Beautiful Soup is a Python library which parses HTML into its individual components such as the tags, attributes and text content, allowing the components to be manipulated.

The application has the following technologies and features:

Flask: The Great Encyclopedia is built using the Flask framework, a lightweight and efficient web framework for Python.
Jinja2 Templating: The code constructs a URL based on user input and uses web scraping techniques (with BeautifulSoup) to extract content from Wikipedia.
Beautiful Soup: BeautifulSoup is employed for web scraping, enabling the app to extract data from the Wikipedia page's HTML content.
URL Construction and Web Scraping: The code constructs a URL based on user input and uses web scraping techniques (with BeautifulSoup) to extract content from Wikipedia.
Requests: The Requests library is utilised to send HTTP requests to Wikipedia and retrieve the HTML content of the pages.

This is my second project involving Beautiful Soup. The first project, Financial Statement Web Scraper can be found here. I started on this project as I wanted to reinforce my understanding of web scraping. Overall, it has been a good learning experience as it reinforced my learnings and allowed me to refactor my previous codes.