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

PyQuery overview

PyQuery is a jQuery-like library for Python that facilitates the easy implementation and use of lxml and CSS selectors.

As the name suggests, PyQuery enhances query-related procedures (XPath and CSS selector expressions) with short and readable lines of code. Web scraping, as you all are aware, requires parsing and traversing features that reside on top of various types of web documents.

PyQuery provides additional features related to DOM and ElementTree, and uses CSS selectors to perform queries. The purpose of using PyQuery expressions (or queries) is similar to that of XPath or CSS selector-based expressions. PyQuery is almost the same as jQuery for web documents.

The following list contains a basic comparison of expressions that collect the href attribute from the <a class="main"> element:

  • PyQuery: response.find('a.main').attr('href')
  • lxml XPath: response.xpath(".//a[contains(@class,'main'...