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

Handling user authentication

In this section, we will be exploring a task that's used to process basic user authentication, which is available from http://testing-ground.scraping.pro/login. User authentication is often processed with a unique combination of information, such as username, password, email, and so on, to identify the user on the website.

The code in this section deals with logging in and changing the login credentials, as well as with obtaining the respective messages from the page.

As we can see in the following screenshot, the HTML <form> exists with two <input> boxes that accept the username and password (that is, the login credentials) that are required to login. Login credentials are private and secure information, but for this particular testing site, the values are visible, predefined, and provided—namely, Username = "admin&quot...