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

Using web browser DevTools to access web content

DevTools are some of the most important tools available to us to explore response content of any type, such as HTML, JSON, XML, or TXT.

In the Developer tools section of Chapter 1, we introduced browser-based DevTools with various helpful, information-packed panels and a brief introduction to them. In this section, as the heading reads, we will be using DevTools to locate, find, or access the web content that we are seeking. Normally, we will search for and find the elements holding content in a similar way to how we dealt with XPath and CSS selectors using expressions.

We will explore web content using Google Chrome. Chrome has built-in DevTools with plenty of features that help us, with information on cookies, headers, curl scripts, prettifying the DOM, DOM navigation, displaying line numbers, folding/unfolding code blocks, element selection, element identification, content searching, and generating XPath and CSS selector expressions...