Create a Wordcloud of News Headlines in Python!

Today, I'll be showing you a simple way to make a wordcloud of news headlines in python!

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If you haven't read this tutorial explaining how to scrape news headlines in python, make sure you do.
In summary, here's the code for scraping news headlines in python:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url='https://www.bbc.com/news'
response = requests.get(url)

soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
headlines = soup.find('body').find_all('h3')
for x in headlines:
    print(x.text.strip())

To create a wordcloud out of these news headlines, first import these 2 libraries beside the libraries needed to scrape our news source:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from wordcloud import WordCloud #add wordcloud
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt #add pyplot from matplotlib

Next, replace

for x in headlines:
    print(x.text.strip())

with

h3text = ''
for x in el:
    h3text = h3text + ' ' + x.text.strip()

• This will first define the "h3text" string, then add every news headline to the string and seperate them with spaces.

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Before we make the wordcloud, you can check the news headlines by using print(h3text)

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To make the wordcloud, add these lines of code to the end of your script:

wordcloud = WordCloud(width=500, height=500, margin=0).generate(soup.get_text(h3text))
plt.imshow(wordcloud, interpolation='bilinear')
plt.axis("off")
plt.margins(x=0, y=0)
plt.show()

Let me explain...

• First create a wordcloud(well, more like a box in this case) sized 500 by 500.
• Next, our wordcloud will be created using "plt.imshow()" (interpolation='bilinear' just makes the words in the wordcloud easier to read).
• plt.axis("off") and plt.margins(x=0, y=0) make sure our wordcloud isn't displayed as a graph.
• Finally, our wordcloud is displayed using "plt.show()".

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If you run your code, your wordcloud should look something like this:

Of course, your wordcloud will probably be quite different since news headlines change all the time.

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That's it for this Tutorial/Mini-project!

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Byeeeee👋