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)

Integrating the REST API with scraping code

In this recipe, we will integrate code that we wrote for scraping and getting a clean job listing from StackOverflow with our API. This will result in a reusable API that can be used to perform on-demand scrapes without the client needing any knowledge of the scraping process. Essentially, we will have created a scraper as a service, a concept we will spend much time with in the remaining recipes of the book.

Getting ready

The first part of this process is to create a module out of our preexisting code that was written in Chapter 7, Text Wrangling and Analysis so that we can reuse it. We will reuse this code in several recipes throughout the remainder of the book. Let's...