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 basic authorization

Some websites use a form of authorization known as basic authorization. This was popular before other means of authorization, such as cookie auth or OAuth. It is also common on corporate intranets and some web APIs. In basic authorization, a header is added to the HTTP request. This header, Authorization, is passed the Basic string and then a base64 encoding of the values <username>:<password>. So in the case of darkhelmet, this header would look as follows:

Authorization: Basic ZGFya2hlbG1ldDp2ZXNwYQ==, with ZGFya2hlbG1ldDp2ZXNwYQ== being darkhelmet:vespa base 64 encoded.

Note that this is no more secure than sending it in plain-text, (although when performed over HTTPS it is secure.) However, for the most part, is has been subsumed for more robust authorization forms, and even cookie authorization allows for more complex features such...