Book Image

Python Web Scraping - Second Edition

By : Katharine Jarmul
Book Image

Python Web Scraping - Second Edition

By: Katharine Jarmul

Overview of this book

The Internet contains the most useful set of data ever assembled, most of which is publicly accessible for free. However, this data is not easily usable. It is embedded within the structure and style of websites and needs to be carefully extracted. Web scraping is becoming increasingly useful as a means to gather and make sense of the wealth of information available online. This book is the ultimate guide to using the latest features of Python 3.x to scrape data from websites. In the early chapters, you'll see how to extract data from static web pages. You'll learn to use caching with databases and files to save time and manage the load on servers. After covering the basics, you'll get hands-on practice building a more sophisticated crawler using browsers, crawlers, and concurrent scrapers. You'll determine when and how to scrape data from a JavaScript-dependent website using PyQt and Selenium. You'll get a better understanding of how to submit forms on complex websites protected by CAPTCHA. You'll find out how to automate these actions with Python packages such as mechanize. You'll also learn how to create class-based scrapers with Scrapy libraries and implement your learning on real websites. By the end of the book, you will have explored testing websites with scrapers, remote scraping, best practices, working with images, and many other relevant topics.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Putting It All Together

This book has so far introduced scraping techniques using a custom website, which helped us focus on learning particular skills. In this chapter, we will analyze a variety of real-world websites to show how the techniques we've learned in the book can be applied. First, we'll use Google to show a real-world search form, then Facebook for a JavaScript-dependent website and API, Gap for a typical online store, and finally, BMW for a map interface. Since these are live websites, there is a risk they will change by the time you read this. However, this is fine because the purpose of this chapter's examples is to show you how the techniques learned so far can be applied, rather than to show you how to scrape any particular website. If you choose to run an example, first check whether the website structure has changed since these examples were made and whether their current terms...