Book Image

Learning Python Networking - Second Edition

By : José Manuel Ortega, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker, Sam Washington
Book Image

Learning Python Networking - Second Edition

By: José Manuel Ortega, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker, Sam Washington

Overview of this book

Network programming has always been a demanding task. With full-featured and well-documented libraries all the way up the stack, Python makes network programming the enjoyable experience it should be. Starting with a walk through of today's major networking protocols, through this book, you'll learn how to employ Python for network programming, how to request and retrieve web resources, and how to extract data in major formats over the web. You will utilize Python for emailing using different protocols, and you'll interact with remote systems and IP and DNS networking. You will cover the connection of networking devices and configuration using Python 3.7, along with cloud-based network management tasks using Python. As the book progresses, socket programming will be covered, followed by how to design servers, and the pros and cons of multithreaded and event-driven architectures. You'll develop practical clientside applications, including web API clients, email clients, SSH, and FTP. These applications will also be implemented through existing web application frameworks.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Introduction to Network and HTTP Programming
4
Section 2: Interacting with APIs, Web Scraping, and Server Scripting
9
Section 3: IP Address Manipulation and Network Automation
13
Section 4: Sockets and Server Programming

Extracting information from web pages and parsing HTML with BeautifulSoup

In this section, we will explore BeautifulSoup as a Python package that allows us to extract information from web pages and parse HTML in Python 3.7.

BeautifulSoup introduction

The BeautifulSoup package contains a library specialized in analyzing and searching data within an HTML file by means of various types of criteria such as the following:

  • Searches of HTML elements by means of the structure of the DOM
  • Searches through selectors
  • Tag searches

BeautifulSoup is a library used to perform web scraping operations from Python, focused on the parsing of web content such as XML, HTML, and JSON.

This tool is not intended directly for web scraping. Instead...