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)

Using Scrapy selectors

Scrapy is a Python web spider framework that is used to extract data from websites. It provides many powerful features for navigating entire websites, such as the ability to follow links. One feature it provides is the ability to find data within a document using the DOM, and using the now, quite familiar, XPath.

In this recipe we will load the list of current questions on StackOverflow, and then parse this using a scrapy selector. Using that selector, we will extract the text of each question.

Getting ready

The code for this recipe is in 02/05_scrapy_selectors.py.

How to do it...

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