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

Accessing the web with Python

Python is a programming language that's used to code various types of applications, from simple scripts to AI algorithms and web frameworks. We will be writing scripts in Python to access the URLs that we are interested in from a data extraction or scraping perspective.

A number of Python libraries exist for HTTP communication and web-related purposes (including http, cookielib, urllib, requests, html, socket, json, xmlrpc, httplib2, and urllib3). We will explore and use a few of them that have been praised by the programmers' community for HTTP access or client-server communication. The urllib and requests Python modules are the ones we are interested in using. These libraries possess various functions that can be used to communicate with the web using Python and deal with HTTP requests and responses.

In order to start a few coding tasks...