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

Introduction to web APIs

Information sharing and processing are in huge demand on the web and across web-based services. A web API is a service available on the web that provides access to resources such as raw data, filtered information, and embedded and dynamic content, normally in a ready-to-use and exchangeable format such as JSON, CSV, or XML.

Information exchange or transfer is the core purpose of web APIs. We can consider an API as a web- or browser-based service or user interface (UI) for retrieving, sharing, or accessing information based on requests made to a web server or API provider. With plenty of security-related vulnerabilities, many providers ask for authentication in the form of an API key (a unique block of identification with a certain length that identifies the user or client with the API or server) or some code to make API processing more efficient and effective.

Web APIs are not dependent on any single programming language (such as ASP, PHP, or JSP); users...