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!

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.

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

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()".

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.

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

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Byeeeee👋