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

Scraping using lxml – a Python library

The lxml library is an XML toolkit with a rich library set to process XML and HTML. lxml is preferred over other XML-based libraries in Python for its high speed and effective memory management, plus it has various other features to handle both small and large XML files.

Python programmers use lxml to process XML and HTML documents. There are plenty of other such libraries in Python; a few even build on top of lxml with extra add-ons. lxml is also used as a parser engine in Python libraries such as Beautiful Soup (https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/) and pandas (https://pandas.pydata.org/).

DOM parsing, traversing element trees, XPath, and CSS selector are the features that make lxml effective and efficient enough for tasks such as web scraping. For more details on lxml and its documentation, please visit https://lxml.de/.

Important note

lxml provides native support to XPath and XSLT and is built on the powerful...