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

Using Selenium to Scrape the Web

So far, we have learned about some Python libraries, web and API-based technologies, data-finding and locating elements, extraction techniques, and plenty of data-related services in Chapters 1 to 7.

Selenium automates browsers – a quote from https://www.selenium.dev/, and it is primarily a collection of tools also known as a testing framework. Selenium is used to automate the web (applications, website forms, and much more) for testing purposes. Along with testing using automation, there are many potential service cum task-based scenarios that can be performed and handled using Selenium. The Selenium framework consists of various modules or components. We will be using Selenium WebDriver.

In general, we will install and learn about Selenium WebDriver, use WebDriver to automate websites, and use Selenium to scrape data from the web.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Introduction to Selenium
  • Using Selenium...