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

Accessing web API and data formats

In this section, we will be exploring various APIs that are available on the web, send requests to them, and receive responses, before explaining how they work via the Python programming language.

Let's consider the following sample URL, https://www.someexampledomain.com. The API it provides comes with parameters, locators, and authentication. By using these, we can access the following resources:

  • https://api.someexampledomain.com
  • https://api.someexampledomain.com/resource?key1=value1&key2=value2
  • https://api.someexampledomain.com/resource?api_key=ACCESS_KEY&key1=value1&key2=value2
  • https://api.someexampledomain.com/resource/v1/2019/01

Parameters or collections of key-value pairs are actually sets of predefined variables that are provided by the web. Usually, the API provides some sort of documentation or basic guidelines regarding...