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 Selenium

As I mentioned, Selenium is a web application framework that can be used for web scraping activities. It can also be used as a browser automation tool.

The automation of tasks or activities related to web applications, such as those in the following list, involves those tasks being performed without the direct involvement of human beings:

  • Browsing
  • Clicking links
  • Saving screenshots
  • Downloading images
  • Filling out HTML <form> templates and many more activities

Selenium provides a web browser as an interface or automated tool. With the automation of the browsing action, Selenium can also be used in web scraping. Dynamic or secure web services that use JavaScript, cookies, scripts, and so on are loaded, tested, and even crawled and scraped with the help of Selenium.

Selenium is open source and can be accessed across multiple platforms. Various web...