FAQ: Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup - Introduction

This community-built FAQ covers the “Introduction” exercise from the lesson “Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup”.

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I am not clear as to the syntax of the first line:

from preprocess import turtles

I get the ‘import turtles’ part, but what does ‘from preprocess’ do/mean?

thank you!

It means that you are importing a dataframe called “turtles” from the module called “preprocess”.
Instead of importing the whole module (import preprocess), you are importing just the dataframe that was implemented on it (from preprocess import turtles).

alternatively, you could do:

import preprocess
print(preprocess.turtles)

in this case, you are importing everything that is inside preprocess module… but after you are only using turtles.

Edit: This link can help you understand why use one or another.

what does preprocess module do?
what is meant by dataframes?

You can think of a dataframe like a table with columns and rows, like an excel spreadsheet or SQL table