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)

Checking Elasticsearch for a listing before scraping

Now lets leverage Elasticsearch as a cache by checking to see if we already have stored a job listing and hence do not need to hit StackOverflow again. We extend the API for performing a scrape of a job listing to first search Elasticsearch, and if the result is found there we return that data. Hence, we optimize the process by making Elasticsearch a job listings cache.

How to do it

We proceed with the recipe as follows:

The code for this recipe is within 09/05/api.py. The JobListing class now has the following implementation:

class JobListing(Resource):
def get(self, job_listing_id):
print("Request for job listing with id: " + job_listing_id)

...