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 Selenium

The testing of web-based applications or systems is compulsory according to the system development life cycle (SDLC), and this step is done prior to the launch of applications on the web. Selenium, an open source project, uses a web browser as an interface for automation and can be used for web-related or web-based activities.

Dynamic and secure web applications using JavaScript (JS), cookies/sessions, other JS scripts, and many more web components can be handled, processed, automated, and crawled with the use of Selenium. “Selenium is an umbrella project for a range of tools and libraries that enable and support the automation of web browsers.” (https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/overview/). Though primarily used for browser-based automation, different cases that can be managed or used with a browser can be tackled using Selenium. This makes Selenium the most popular and appreciated automation-related browser-based tool.

Selenium is...