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

Exploring PyQuery

PyQuery addresses DOM-based expressions or queries in a quick, easy, and effective manner. In this section, we will install PyQuery and explore a few of its important features so that we are ready to develop a web scraping script.

Important note

You can find plenty of Python libraries that are similar to PyQuery. A few examples are parsel (https://pypi.org/project/parsel/), beautifulsoup (https://pypi.org/project/beautifulsoup4/), selectolax (https://pypi.org/project/selectolax/), and, of course, lxml (https://pypi.org/project/lxml/).

Installing PyQuery

Please refer to the Technical requirements section before proceeding with installing the PyQuery library. With the help of the virtual environment (secondEd) you created in Chapter 2, install or update PyQuery using pip:

Figure 4.1: Installing PyQuery

Figure 4.1: Installing PyQuery

As shown in Figure 4.1, installing PyQuery also installs or updates the lxml and cssselect libraries. To verify the installation...