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)

Handling forms and forms-based authorization

We are often required to log into a site before we can crawl its content. This is usually done through a form where we enter a user name and password, press Enter, and then granted access to previously hidden content. This type of form authentication is often called cookie authorization, as when we authorize, the server creates a cookie that it can use to verify that you have signed in. Scrapy respects these cookies, so all we need to do is somehow automate the form during our crawl.

Getting ready

We will crawl a page in the containers web site at the following URL: http://localhost:5001/home/secured. On this page, and links from that page, there is content we would like to scrape...