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

Preface

Web scraping is an essential technique used in many organizations to scrape valuable data from web pages. Web scraping, or web harvesting, is done with a view to extracting and collecting data from websites. Web scraping comes in handy with model development, which requires data to be collected on the fly. It is also applicable for the data that is true and relevant to the topic, in which the accuracy is desired over the short-term, as opposed to implementing datasets. Data collected is stored in files including JSON, CSV, and XML, is also written a the database for later use, and is also made available online as datasets. This book will open the gates for you in terms of delving deep into web scraping techniques and methodologies using Python libraries and other popular tools, such as Selenium. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently scrape different websites.