Book Image

Python Web Scraping Cookbook

By : Michael Heydt
Book Image

Python Web Scraping Cookbook

By: Michael Heydt

Overview of this book

Python Web Scraping Cookbook is a solution-focused book that will teach you techniques to develop high-performance scrapers and deal with crawlers, sitemaps, forms automation, Ajax-based sites, caches, and more. You'll explore a number of real-world scenarios where every part of the development/product life cycle will be fully covered. You will not only develop the skills needed to design and develop reliable performance data flows, but also deploy your codebase to AWS. If you are involved in software engineering, product development, or data mining (or are interested in building data-driven products), you will find this book useful as each recipe has a clear purpose and objective. Right from extracting data from the websites to writing a sophisticated web crawler, the book's independent recipes will be a godsend. This book covers Python libraries, requests, and BeautifulSoup. You will learn about crawling, web spidering, working with Ajax websites, paginated items, and more. You will also learn to tackle problems such as 403 errors, working with proxy, scraping images, and LXML. By the end of this book, you will be able to scrape websites more efficiently and able to deploy and operate your scraper in the cloud.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

How to parse websites and navigate the DOM using BeautifulSoup

When the browser displays a web page it builds a model of the content of the page in a representation known as the document object model (DOM). The DOM is a hierarchical representation of the page's entire content, as well as structural information, style information, scripts, and links to other content.

It is critical to understand this structure to be able to effectively scrape data from web pages. We will look at an example web page, its DOM, and examine how to navigate the DOM with Beautiful Soup.

Getting ready

We will use a small web site that is included in the www folder of the sample code. To follow along, start a web server from within the www folder...