Book Image

Learning Python

By : Romano
Book Image

Learning Python

By: Romano

Overview of this book

Learning Python has a dynamic and varied nature. It reads easily and lays a good foundation for those who are interested in digging deeper. It has a practical and example-oriented approach through which both the introductory and the advanced topics are explained. Starting with the fundamentals of programming and Python, it ends by exploring very different topics, like GUIs, web apps and data science. The book takes you all the way to creating a fully fledged application. The book begins by exploring the essentials of programming, data structures and teaches you how to manipulate them. It then moves on to controlling the flow of a program and writing reusable and error proof code. You will then explore different programming paradigms that will allow you to find the best approach to any situation, and also learn how to perform performance optimization as well as effective debugging. Throughout, the book steers you through the various types of applications, and it concludes with a complete mini website built upon all the concepts that you learned.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

First approach – scripting


Now, let's start writing the script. I'll go through the source in three steps: imports first, then the argument parsing logic, and finally the business logic.

The imports

scrape.py (Imports)

import argparse
import base64
import json
import os
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

Going through them from the top, you can see that we'll need to parse the arguments. which we'll feed to the script itself (argparse). We will need the base64 library to save the images within a JSON file (base64 and json), and we'll need to open files for writing (os). Finally, we'll need BeautifulSoup for scraping the web page easily, and requests to fetch its content. requests is an extremely popular library for performing HTTP requests, built to avoid the difficulties and quirks of using the standard library urllib module. It's based on the fast urllib3 third-party library.

Note

We will explore the HTTP protocol and requests mechanism in Chapter 10, Web Development Done Right...