Book Image

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python

By : Anish Chapagain
Book Image

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python

By: Anish Chapagain

Overview of this book

Web scraping is an essential technique used in many organizations to gather valuable data from web pages. This book will enable you to delve into web scraping techniques and methodologies. The book will introduce you to the fundamental concepts of web scraping techniques and how they can be applied to multiple sets of web pages. You'll use powerful libraries from the Python ecosystem such as Scrapy, lxml, pyquery, and bs4 to carry out web scraping operations. You will then get up to speed with simple to intermediate scraping operations such as identifying information from web pages and using patterns or attributes to retrieve information. This book adopts a practical approach to web scraping concepts and tools, guiding you through a series of use cases and showing you how to use the best tools and techniques to efficiently scrape web pages. You'll even cover the use of other popular web scraping tools, such as Selenium, Regex, and web-based APIs. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently scrape the web using different techniques with Python and other popular tools.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Introduction to Web Scraping
3
Section 2: Beginning Web Scraping
8
Section 3: Advanced Concepts
13
Section 4: Conclusion

Introduction to web APIs

A web-based application programming information, or web-based API, is an interface provided by a website to return information for the request that's received. A web API (or API) is actually a web service that's provided by websites to users or third-party web applications or automated scripts in order to share and exchange information.

Generally, this is a user interface (UI) that's processed via a web browser for retrieving certain information from requests that have been made to a website or web server. Websites with large amount of information of any type can provide a web API to their user, which facilitates information sharing.

API in the field of software applications is known for its set of facilities, such as methods and libraries, which can be used to further enhance, build, or develop applications. This is also known as a developer...