This Python code is a web-scraping script designed to extract historical iPad prices from Apple's website by utilizing the Wayback Machine (a digital archive of the web). The extracted data is saved into CSV files for different countries. Below is a breakdown of what each section does: 1. Imports The code imports several libraries: datetime and timedelta from datetime: To handle date manipulations. requests: To make HTTP requests. BeautifulSoup from bs4: To parse HTML content. pandas: To handle data in a structured format (DataFrame). re: To work with regular expressions for pattern matching. 2. Country and Currency Setup python Copy code country_codes = ['AE', 'AU', 'BR', 'CA', 'AT', 'US', 'CZ', 'BE-NL', 'DE', 'DK'] currency_codes = ['AED', 'AUD', 'BRL', 'CAD', 'EUR', 'USD', 'CZK', 'EUR', 'EUR', 'DKK'] country_list = [country.lower() for country in country_codes] Lists of country_codes and currency_codes are created. A country_list is generated by converting country_codes to lowercase. This setup allows the code to loop through countries and currencies for data extraction. 3. Date Range Configuration python Copy code start_date = "2016-01-01" end_date = "2023-05-07" Specifies the date range for data extraction. This date range will be used to generate URLs for web scraping. 4. Functions generate_urls() Takes a start date, end date, and country code as inputs. Creates a list of URLs using the Wayback Machine's archived snapshots of the Apple website. Each URL corresponds to a weekly snapshot within the specified date range. get_prices() Parses the HTML content (soup) to extract prices using different methods. The methods vary in terms of how the prices are structured in the HTML, accounting for changes over time. get_products() Similar to get_prices(), but extracts product names instead. Uses different methods to identify iPad models, adapting to changes in the HTML layout. extract_data() Takes a URL, currency, and country as inputs. Fetches the webpage and parses it using BeautifulSoup. Extracts the date of the snapshot from the URL. Calls get_products() and get_prices() to get lists of products and prices. If successful, it extracts the data into a structured format and returns a Pandas DataFrame. 5. Main Processing Loop The loop iterates over each country and its associated currency: python Copy code for country, currency in zip(country_list, currency_codes): ... Generates URLs for each country using the generate_urls() function. Iterates over each URL and tries to extract the data. Handles exceptions if any URL fails to be processed. The extracted data is stored in a list of DataFrames (dataframes). 6. Data Aggregation and Storage Combines the extracted data for each country into a single DataFrame. Saves the data to a CSV file named ipad_prices_{country}_test.csv. Summary This script is primarily designed to: Scrape historical iPad prices for multiple countries using archived snapshots of the Apple website. Store the extracted data in a structured format (Pandas DataFrame). Save the data to CSV files for further analysis or reporting. Potential Uses: Track price trends over time. Compare iPad prices across different countries. Conduct market analysis based on historical pricing data. Error Handling There are error-handling mechanisms in place for both product and price extraction. If a URL fails to return data, an error message is displayed. Assumptions/Limitations Assumes the Wayback Machine has a consistent weekly snapshot available for each date in the range. Assumes the HTML structure of the Apple page may change over time, hence multiple methods for price and product extraction are implemented. It only considers iPad-related products and may not capture other models not included in the specified class names.