Book Image

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python - Second Edition

By : Anish Chapagain
Book Image

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python - Second Edition

By: Anish Chapagain

Overview of this book

Web scraping is a powerful tool for extracting data from the web, but it can be daunting for those without a technical background. Designed for novices, this book will help you grasp the fundamentals of web scraping and Python programming, even if you have no prior experience. Adopting a practical, hands-on approach, this updated edition of Hands-On Web Scraping with Python uses real-world examples and exercises to explain key concepts. Starting with an introduction to web scraping fundamentals and Python programming, you’ll cover a range of scraping techniques, including requests, lxml, pyquery, Scrapy, and Beautiful Soup. You’ll also get to grips with advanced topics such as secure web handling, web APIs, Selenium for web scraping, PDF extraction, regex, data analysis, EDA reports, visualization, and machine learning. This book emphasizes the importance of learning by doing. Each chapter integrates examples that demonstrate practical techniques and related skills. By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with the skills to extract data from websites, a solid understanding of web scraping and Python programming, and the confidence to use these skills in your projects for analysis, visualization, and information discovery.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1:Python and Web Scraping
4
Part 2:Beginning Web Scraping
8
Part 3:Advanced Scraping Concepts
13
Part 4:Advanced Data-Related Concepts
16
Part 5:Conclusion

Data Extraction Using Web APIs

So far, we have learned about the web, web-based technologies, techniques for locating and extracting data, and plenty of data-related services in various chapters of this book.

Web application programming interfaces (APIs) are built to interact with queried information. Web APIs provide interfaces to query and access formatted data (normally in JSON format) or structured data that is easy to use and process. Depending on the type of information (HTTP POST payload, JSON content, third-party authentication, collective metadata, or middleware, for example) being carried and the type of service being engaged with, authentication and some form of tokenization are also required.

In general, a web API is a medium for loading, seeking, transferring, and embedding information in pages or other APIs.

In this chapter, we will learn about the following topics:

  • Introduction to web APIs
  • Data formats and patterns in APIs
  • Web scraping using...