How to Use Python to Scrape Images for Your iOS App – A Step‑by‑Step Guide

Why Python is a Good Second Language for iOS Developers

For developers whose only prior languages are C or C++, Python is an ideal second language because its syntax is simple, it offers a vast ecosystem of libraries, and its code is much more readable than Objective‑C.

Setting Up Python and Installing Packages

macOS ships with Python 2.x. To add third‑party libraries you use pip, the Python equivalent of CocoaPods. Run the following command in Terminal to install BeautifulSoup (urllib2 is built‑in):

pip install beautifulsoup4

Downloading a Web Page

Import the required modules and fetch the target page:

import urllib2
import urllib
import os
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.pcpop.com/doc/1/1279/1279531.shtml').read()

Parsing HTML with BeautifulSoup

Create a BeautifulSoup object and locate all img tags whose width attribute equals 175:

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
liResult = soup.findAll('img', attrs={"width": "175"})

The findAll call returns a list of matching tags.

Extracting Image URLs and Saving Files

Iterate over the result list, retrieve each image’s src attribute, and download the file:

count = 0
for image in liResult:
    link = image.get('src')
    count += 1
    imageName = str(count) + '.jpg'
    savePath = os.path.join('/path/to/save', imageName)
    urllib.urlretrieve(link, savePath)

After the script finishes, all images are saved locally and can be used directly in your iOS app.

By following these steps you can quickly build a simple image‑scraping tool in Python, avoiding the need for complex regular expressions or manual HTML parsing.