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

Regex with Python

Python programming is known for its simple, readable, reusable, and short code. Python is also popular because of its scientific computing and text computation features (natural language processing (NLP), sentiment analysis (SA), and many more). Regex is also one of the core powers of Python as re (the regex library) is provided as a system or built-in library that is available with Python installation.

Let’s dive deep into re and have a look at some of the features using code. For this example, we will use the following famous quote from Sadhguru (available at https://isha.sadhguru.org/us/en/wisdom/type/quotes):

If you do not turn against yourself, the Human Potential is limitless.

We have defined a Python variable named quote that contains the preceding quote as its value:

quote="If you do not turn against yourself, the Human Potential is limitless"

In the coming sections, we will find words that are at least three characters long...