Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Jaime Buelta
Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Jaime Buelta

Overview of this book

In this updated and extended version of Python Automation Cookbook, each chapter now comprises the newest recipes and is revised to align with Python 3.8 and higher. The book includes three new chapters that focus on using Python for test automation, machine learning projects, and for working with messy data. This edition will enable you to develop a sharp understanding of the fundamentals required to automate business processes through real-world tasks, such as developing your first web scraping application, analyzing information to generate spreadsheet reports with graphs, and communicating with automatically generated emails. Once you grasp the basics, you will acquire the practical knowledge to create stunning graphs and charts using Matplotlib, generate rich graphics with relevant information, automate marketing campaigns, build machine learning projects, and execute debugging techniques. By the end of this book, you will be proficient in identifying monotonous tasks and resolving process inefficiencies to produce superior and reliable systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
14
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15
Index

Building Your First Web Scraping Application

The internet, and the World Wide Web (WWW), is probably the most prominent source of information today. Most of that information is retrievable through HTTP. HTTP was invented originally to share pages of hypertext (hence the name HyperText Transfer Protocol), which started the WWW.

This process happens each time that we request a web page, so it should be familiar to almost everyone. But we can also perform these operations programmatically to retrieve and process information automatically. Python has in its standard library an HTTP client, but the fantastic requests module makes obtaining web pages very easy. In this chapter, we will see how.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following recipes:

  • Downloading web pages
  • Parsing HTML
  • Crawling the web
  • Subscribing to feeds
  • Accessing web APIs
  • Interacting with forms
  • Using Selenium for advanced interaction
  • Accessing password...