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

Technical requirements

The Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox web browser will be required and we will be using Python notebooks with JupyterLab.

Please refer to the Setting things up and Creating a virtual environment sections of Chapter 2 and continue using the environment we created.

The Python libraries that are required for this chapter are as follows:

  • lxml
  • urllib

The code files for this chapter are available online on GitHub: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Web-Scraping-with-Python-Second-Edition/tree/main/Chapter03.

Important note

Web- or website-based content refers to the responses or page sources that are received after processing requests to a URL. Content can be of various types, such as PDF, CSV, TXT, XML, HTML, and JSON. In general, in this chapter, we are talking about HTML, page source, or markup documents as our primary content, unless stated otherwise.