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)

Supporting page redirects

Page redirects in Scrapy are handled using redirect middleware, which is enabled by default. The process can be further configured using the following parameters:

  • REDIRECT_ENABLED: (True/False - default is True)
  • REDIRECT_MAX_TIMES: (The maximum number of redirections to follow for any single request - default is 20)

How to do it

The script in 06/02_scrapy_redirects.py demonstrates how to configure Scrapy to handle redirects. This configures a maximum of two redirects for any page. Running the script reads the NASA sitemap and crawls that content. This contains a large number of redirects, many of which are redirects from HTTP to HTTPS versions of URLs. There will be a lot of output, but here are...