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 web scraping

Scraping is the process of extracting, copying, screening, or collecting data. Scraping or extracting data from the web (commonly known as websites or web pages, or internet-related resources) is normally termed web scraping.

Web scraping is a process of data extraction from the web that is suitable for certain requirements. Data collection and analysis, and its involvement in information and decision making, plus research-related activities, make the scraping process sensitive for all types of industry.

The popularity of the internet and its resources is causing information domains to evolve every day, which is also causing a growing demand for raw data. Data is the basic requirement in the fields of science, technology, and management. Collected or organized data is processed with varying degrees of logic to obtain information and gain further insights...