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

URL handling and operations

In this section, we will explore the operations that are required when handling URLs. In the browser, we input a URL as a request and receive an output or a response, but plenty of operations take place behind the scenes, and we can view these operations using browser-based DevTools.

We mentioned DevTools in the Developer tools section in Chapter 1, when we discussed the role of certain panels, such as the Network panel, found in DevTools. As we are diving deep into using libraries for HTTP-based communication and creating or dealing with code, it is quite important to deal with or monitor the HTTP information found in the Network panel while accessing the URL in the browser.

The information found in the different sections of the Network panel, such as Request URL, Request Headers, Request Method, Response Headers, Status Code, and Cookies, are important in the sense that we as developers are trying to automate, verify, inject, or use that information...