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)

Performing OCR on an image with pytesseract

It is possible to extract text from within images using the pytesseract library. In this recipe, we will use pytesseract to extract text from an image. Tesseract is an open source OCR library sponsored by Google. The source is available here: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract, and you can also find more information on the library there. 0;pytesseract is a thin python wrapper that provides a pythonic API to the executable.

Getting ready

Make sure you have pytesseract installed:

pip install pytesseract

You will also need to install tesseract-ocr. On Windows, there is an executable installer, which you can get here: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki/4.0-with...