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)

Removing punctuation marks

Depending upon the tokenizer used, and the input to those tokenizers, it may be desired to remove punctuation from the resulting list of tokens. The regexp_tokenize function with '\w+' as the expression removes punctuation well, but word_tokenize does not do it very well and will return many punctuation marks as their own tokens.

How to do it

Removing punctuation marks from our tokens is done similarly to the removal of other words within our tokens by using a list comprehension and only selecting those items that are not punctuation marks. The script 07/09_remove_punctuation.py file demonstrates this. Let's walk through the process:

  1. We'll start with the following, which will...