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

Web Scraping Fundamentals

In this chapter, we will learn about and explore certain fundamental concepts related to web scraping and web-based technologies, assuming that you have no prior experience of web scraping.

So, to start with, let's begin by asking a number of questions:

  • Why is there a growing need or demand for data?
  • How are we going to manage and fulfill the requirement for data with resources from the World Wide Web (WWW)?

Web scraping addresses both these questions, as it provides various tools and technologies that can be deployed to extract data or assist with information retrieval. Whether its web-based structured or unstructured data, we can use the web scraping process to extract data and use it for research, analysis, personal collections, information extraction, knowledge discovery, and many more purposes.

We will learn general techniques that are...