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

Overview of regular expressions

Regular expressions are used to match patterns found in text or strings. Regex can be used for testing and finding patterns as desired against text or web content. Regex contains various ways to define patterns and special notations, such as escape codes to apply some predefined rules. For more information on Regex, please refer to the Further reading section.

There are various cases where Regex can be quite effective and quick for obtaining the desired results. Regex can be applied to content (text or web sources) alone and can be used to target specific information patterns that aren't easily extractable while using XPath, CSS selectors, BS4, PyQuery, and so on.

Sometimes, cases may arise that will demand Regex and XPath or CSS selectors to be used together in order to obtain the desired output. This output can then be tested using Regex...