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)

Introduction

Developing a reliable scraper is never easy, there are so many what ifs that we need to take into account. What if the website goes down? What if the response returns unexpected data? What if your IP is throttled or blocked? What if authentication is required? While we can never predict and cover all what ifs, we will discuss some common traps, challenges, and workarounds.

Note that several of the recipes require access to a website that I have provided as a Docker container. They require more logic than the simple, static site we used in earlier chapters. Therefore, you will need to pull and run a Docker container using the following Docker commands:

docker pull mheydt/pywebscrapecookbook
docker run -p 5001:5001 pywebscrapecookbook