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

Accessing the WWW with Python

As we saw in the Why Python (for web scraping)? section, there are plenty of Python libraries for interacting with HTTP. requests and urllib are the two libraries that we are interested in using because of their in-depth features, various functions for dealing with HTTP communication, easy-to-read documentation, and popularity.

In order to start accessing the WWW with Python using these libraries, let’s verify that we have installed all of the required resources. In the following subsections, we will start setting things up, such as installing Python, creating a virtual environment, installing libraries in the created environment, and accessing the web using Python libraries.

Setting things up

It is assumed that the latest version of Python has been installed on your system. If not, please visit https://www.python.org/downloads/ for the latest version of Python for your OS. Regarding the general setup and installation procedure, please...