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

URL handling and operations with urllib and requests

For our primary motive of extracting data from a web page, it's necessary to work with URLs. In the examples we've seen so far, we have noticed some pretty simple URLs being used with Python to communicate with their source or contents. The web scraping process often requires the use of different URLs from various domains that do not exist in the same format or pattern.

Developers might also face many cases where there will be a requirement for URL manipulation (altering, cleaning) to access the resource quickly and conveniently. URL handling and operations are used to set up, alter query parameters, or clean up unnecessary parameters. It also passes the required request headers with the appropriate values and identification of the proper HTTP method for making requests. There will be many cases where you will find...