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)

Visualizing contributor location frequency on Wikipedia

We can use the collected data to determine the frequency of edits of Wikipedia articles from countries around the world. This can be done by grouping the captured data by country and counting the number of edits related to each country. Then we will sort the data and create a bar chart to see the results.

How to do it

This is a very simple task to perform with pandas. The code of the example is in 08/03_visualize_wikipedia_edits.py.

  1. The code begins by importing pandas and matplotlib.pyplot:
>>> import pandas as pd
>>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  1. The data file we created in the previous recipe is already in a format that can be read directly by...