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

Searching and Processing Web Documents

So far, we have learned about web scraping, data-finding techniques, and related technologies that help us with scraping, and we’ve identified a few reasons to select the Python programming language.

Web- or website-based content exists as HTML elements or as a predefined document or some kind of object (JSON). For extraction purposes, we need to analyze and identify such content, patterns, and objects. HTML-based elements are generally identified with XML Path (XPath) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) selectors, which are traversed and processed with scraping logic for the desired content. The lxml library will be used in this chapter to process markup documents. We will be using browser-based Developer Tools (DevTools) for finding content and element identification.

In particular, we will learn about the following topics in this chapter:

  • Introducing XPath and CSS selectors to process markup documents
  • Using web browser...