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 regex to extract data

In the previous sections of this chapter, we explored various aspects of regex, with examples. Regex can be applied to all types of content – such as content analysis, extendibility, and time and resource (machine) analysis. This analysis is important to figure out which extraction-related options to choose, such as XPath, CSS selectors, and PyQuery.

Important note

It’s often mentioned in the literature that regex should only be applied when the content is unstructured (for data extraction), but this is not the case. Regex can be used in any type of content (structured or unstructured).

To extract data, from a scraping point of view, we’ll explore a few examples using regex and explore some of its functionality and properties.

Example 1 – Yamaha dealer information

In this example, we will be collecting information on motor dealers (dealers’ geo-location, more precisely) from https://yamaha-moto.cfaomotors...