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

Next Steps

So far, we have explored various tools and techniques regarding web scraping via the use of the Python programming language.

Web scraping, or web harvesting, is done in order to extract and collect data from websites. Web scraping comes in handy in terms of model development, which requires data to be collected on the fly that's true, relevant to the topic, and accurate. This is desirable as it takes less time compared to implementing datasets. The data that's collected is stored in various formats, such as JSON, CSV, XML, and more, is written to databases for later use, and is also made available online as datasets.

Websites also provide web APIs with a user interface to interact with information on the web. This data can be used for research, analysis, marketing, machine learning (ML) models, information building, knowledge discovery, and more in the field...