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

Overview of regex

There are plenty of cases when it’s quite hard or even impossible to locate some web-based content or elements with XPath and CSS selectors. Fortunately, we can overcome such situations using a regex. A regex is an expression built using strings that is used to find or search content by identifying an existing pattern.

In web scraping and extraction-related activities, a regex is also used as a final or firsthand pattern-matching option. Patterns can be defined using various steps, often accompanied by special notations that represent predefined rules. A regex is like grouping and writing plain text, and many libraries and text-related features exist that use these expressions, providing us with handy, easy-to-use functions.

The latest code editors, document readers, and writing programs all provide facilities such as searching in files, multiple pages, and inside project folders, and using find and replace. To use these options, we need to input text...