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

Web requests

Throughout the chapters of this book, the requests Python library has been used to establish communication between the code and the web. Plenty of Python libraries can be found at https://pypi.org/ if we search for ones similar to requests.

The following subsections list some Python libraries and technologies and provide brief introductions to them.

pycurl

The pycurl Python library (http://pycurl.io/) is a wrapper on top of the popular libcurl library. libcurl is one of the earliest Python libraries that was used to communicate with websites on the internet, based on the curl tool (also known as cURL).

curl (https://curl.se/) is a command-line tool that is used to connect and transfer data over the web. curl is the basis of network communication; it’s a core implementation that is used with the help of a wrapper across different operating systems (OSs), browsers, and machines that communicate with the internet. The curl command is machine-independent...