Web Scraping & Bots · Lesson

Extracting Data from HTML Tables

Learn to reliably parse tabular HTML data, handle rowspan and colspan, and convert messy tables into clean structured rows.

Why Tables Are Tricky

HTML <table> elements look simple but are one of the most error-prone targets in scraping. Rows can merge cells, headers can repeat, and layout tables masquerade as data tables.

Data tables hold real records you want.
Layout tables only control visual structure.

This lesson focuses on extracting clean rows from genuine data tables.

Anatomy of a Table

A table is built from a few key tags:

<thead> / <tbody> group header and body rows.
<tr> is a single row.
<th> is a header cell, <td> is a data cell.

Knowing these landmarks lets you target rows precisely instead of grabbing raw text.

<table>
  <thead><tr><th>Name</th><th>Price</th></tr></thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr><td>Widget</td><td>$9.99</td></tr>
    <tr><td>Gadget</td><td>$14.50</td></tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

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