Why is b' ' included in the excel file after web scraping? - web-scraping

Question

I'm learning web scraping and was able to scrape data from a website to an excel file. However, in the excel file, you can see that it also includes b' ', instead of just the strings (names of Youtube channels, uploads, views). Any idea where this came from?
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import csv
import requests
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.150 Safari/537.36'} # Need to use this otherwise it returns error 403.
url = requests.get('https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/50/mostviewed', headers=headers)
#print(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(url.text, 'lxml')
rows = soup.find('div', attrs = {'style': 'float: right; width: 900px;'}).find_all('div', recursive = False)[4:] # If in the inspect of the website, it uses class, then instead of 'style", type in '_class = ' instead. We don't need the first 4 rows, so [4:]
file = open('/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/My_Projects/Web_scraping/topyoutubers.csv', 'w')
writer = csv.writer(file)
# write header rows
writer.writerow(['Username', 'Uploads', 'Views'])
for row in rows:
username = row.find('a').text.strip()
numbers = row.find_all('span', attrs = {'style': 'color:#555;'})
uploads = numbers[0].text.strip()
views = numbers[1].text.strip()
print(username + ' ' + uploads + ' ' + views)
writer.writerow([username.encode('utf-8'), uploads.encode('utf-8'), views.encode('utf-8')])
file.close()

Answer 1

It is caused by the way you do your encoding - you might better define it once while opening the file:
file = open('topyoutubers.csv', 'w', encoding='utf-8')
New code
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import csv
import requests
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.150 Safari/537.36'} # Need to use this otherwise it returns error 403.
url = requests.get('https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/50/mostviewed', headers=headers)
#print(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(url.text, 'lxml')
rows = soup.find('div', attrs = {'style': 'float: right; width: 900px;'}).find_all('div', recursive = False)[4:] # If in the inspect of the website, it uses class, then instead of 'style", type in '_class = ' instead. We don't need the first 4 rows, so [4:]
file = open('/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/My_Projects/Web_scraping/topyoutubers.csv', 'w', encoding='utf-8')
writer = csv.writer(file)
# write header rows
writer.writerow(['Username', 'Uploads', 'Views'])
for row in rows:
username = row.find('a').text.strip()
numbers = row.find_all('span', attrs = {'style': 'color:#555;'})
uploads = numbers[0].text.strip()
views = numbers[1].text.strip()
print(username + ' ' + uploads + ' ' + views)
writer.writerow([username, uploads, views])
file.close()
Output
Username Uploads Views
1 T-Series 15,029 143,032,749,708
2 Cocomelon - Nursery Rhymes 605 93,057,513,422
3 SET India 48,505 78,282,384,002
4 Zee TV 97,302 59,037,594,757