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)

Creating a REST API with Flask-RESTful

We start with the creation of a simple REST API using Flask-RESTful. This initial API will consist of a single method that lets the caller pass an integer value and which returns a JSON blob. In this recipe, the parameters and their values, as well as the return value, are not important at this time as we want to first simply get an API up and running using Flask-RESTful.

Getting ready

Flask is a web microframework that makes creating simple web application functionality incredibly easy. Flask-RESTful is an extension to Flask which does the same for making REST APIs just as simple. You can get Flask and read more about it at flask.pocoo.org. Flask-RESTful can be read about at https...