What is web scraping?

Web scraping refers to the practice of extracting data from websites using software tools or scripts. This process involves navigating through the website's structure, typically HTML, and retrieving the desired information, which could be anything from product prices, user reviews, or event details. The ability to automate data extraction provides significant advantages, such as gathering large amounts of data quickly, which would be time-consuming to do manually.

The other options describe different concepts related to web development and content management but do not accurately define web scraping. Enhancing website design, creating websites from scratch, and editing content in an existing website are all distinct activities that do not involve the extraction of data from web pages. Therefore, the core function of web scraping is solely focused on data retrieval from online sources.