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)

Working with CSV and JSON data

Extracting data from HTML pages is done using the techniques in the previous chapter, primarily using XPath through various tools and also with Beautiful Soup. While we will focus primarily on HTML, HTML is a variant of XML (eXtensible Markup Language). XML one was the most popular for of expressing data on the web, but other have become popular, and even exceeded XML in popularity.

Two common formats that you will see are JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and CSV (Comma Separated Values). CSV is easy to create and a common form for many spreadsheet applications, so many web sites provide data in that for, or you will need to convert scraped data to that format for further storage or collaboration. JSON really has become the preferred format, due to its easy within programming languages such as JavaScript (and Python), and many database now support...