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

Managing scraped data

In this section, we will explore some tools and learn more about handling and managing the data that we have scraped or extracted from certain websites.

Data that's collected from websites using scraping scripts is known as raw data. This data might require some additional tasks to be performed on top of it before it can be processed further so that we can gain an insight on it. Therefore, raw data should be verified and processed (if required), which can be done by doing the following:

  • Cleaning: As the name suggests, this step is used to remove unwanted pieces of information, such as space and whitespace characters, and unwanted portions of text. The following code shows some relevant steps that were used in examples in previous chapters, such as Chapter 9, Using Regex to Extract Data, and Chapter 3, Using LXML, XPath, and CSS Selectors. Functions...