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)

Downloading and saving images to the local file system

Sometimes when scraping we just download and parse data, such as HTML, to extract some data, and then throw out what we read. Other times, we want to keep the downloaded content by storing it as a file.

How to do it

The code example for this recipe is in the 04/05_save_image_as_file.py file. The portion of the file of importance is:

# download the image
item = URLUtility(const.ApodEclipseImage())

# create a file writer to write the data
FileBlobWriter(expanduser("~")).write(item.filename, item.data)

Run the script with your Python interpreter and you will get the following output:

Reading URL: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1709/BT5643s.jpg
Read 171014 bytes
Attempting...