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 WebDriver

Selenium is used for browser automation, and one of its major components, WebDriver, is the core tool to access browsers. WebDriver implements code logic for selected browsers that is required during automation. It’s also the core system that binds the Selenium framework with the browser and often gets called or referred to as Selenium driver or only driver. For more detailed information, visit this link: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/webdriver/getting_started/.

Before going deep into the automation or using the framework, let’s install the required libraries in the next section.

Setting things up

To explore browser automation using Python and Selenium WebDriver, first, we need to install the selenium library (a Python library), and browser-related drivers.

Important note

Selenium is a framework that contains various components such as WebDriver and others, whereas selenium is a Python library (https://www.selenium.dev...