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.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Free Chapter

Section 1: Introduction to Web Scraping

Section 1: Introduction to Web Scraping

Web Scraping Fundamentals

Web Scraping Fundamentals

Introduction to web scraping

Understanding web development and technologies

Data finding techniques for the web

Further reading

Section 2: Beginning Web Scraping

Section 2: Beginning Web Scraping

Python and the Web – Using urllib and Requests

Python and the Web – Using urllib and Requests

Technical requirements

Accessing the web with Python

URL handling and operations with urllib and requests

Implementing HTTP methods

Further reading

Using LXML, XPath, and CSS Selectors

Using LXML, XPath, and CSS Selectors

Technical requirements

Introduction to XPath and CSS selector

Using web browser developer tools for accessing web content

Scraping using lxml, a Python library

Further reading

Scraping Using pyquery – a Python Library

Scraping Using pyquery – a Python Library

Technical requirements

Introduction to pyquery

Exploring pyquery

Web scraping using pyquery

Further reading

Web Scraping Using Scrapy and Beautiful Soup

Web Scraping Using Scrapy and Beautiful Soup

Technical requirements

Web scraping using Beautiful Soup

Web scraping using Scrapy

Deploying a web crawler

Further reading

Section 3: Advanced Concepts

Section 3: Advanced Concepts

Working with Secure Web

Working with Secure Web

Technical requirements

Introduction to secure web

HTML <form> processing

Handling user authentication

Working with cookies and sessions

Further reading

Data Extraction Using Web-Based APIs

Data Extraction Using Web-Based APIs

Technical requirements

Introduction to web APIs

Accessing web API and data formats

Web scraping using APIs

Further reading

Using Selenium to Scrape the Web

Using Selenium to Scrape the Web

Technical requirements

Introduction to Selenium

Using Selenium for web scraping

Further reading

Using Regex to Extract Data

Using Regex to Extract Data

Technical requirements

Overview of regular expressions

Using regular expressions to extract data

Further reading

Section 4: Conclusion

Section 4: Conclusion

Next Steps

Technical requirements

Managing scraped data

Analysis and visualization using pandas and matplotlib

Machine learning

Further reading

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HTML <form> processing

In this section, we will be handling form processing or form submission in order to search for an activity from http://toscrape.com (ViewState). ViewState is an AJAX-based filter form.

This particular form submission is performed in multiple steps with the help of AJAX (https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_ajax_intro.asp). For more information on AJAX, please visit W3Schools AJAX:

http://toscrape.com with various endpoints in the Quotes section

Let's set up the code. The pyquery and requests libraries need to be imported and the required URLs need to be collected so that they can be used. The processRequests() function, along with positional and named arguments, is used for processing requests to the provided url, with the HTTP POST and GET methods based on the params argument returning a PyQuery object as a response.

We are also interested in iterating...