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

Scraping using Selenium

Selenium is used for automation – primarily web testing – using various browsers and coding in different languages. Along with automation, the benefits or features provided are quite handy and can be utilized in tasks such as web scraping.

In this section, we will use and explore quite a few features from the selenium library for web scraping.

Example 1 – book information

In this example, we will collect some details from the books listed in the Childrens category at the URL http://books.toscrape.com, which are available in the fictional bookstore at the https://toscrape.com URL.

In particular, we are searching for the anchor element <a>, which contains the bookstore text (partial text or a portion of the text) after loading mainUrl. With element <a> being traced, the href attribute from <a> can be collected using the get_attribute() method for link. The click() method clicks the element that contains the bookstore...