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

Web scraping using PyQuery

This section is loaded with examples that explain how to code a web scraping script. We will be using the PyQuery and requests libraries and dealing with HTML and XML content from the web. We will write the data collected in these examples to CSV or JSON files.

Example 1 – scraping book details

In this example, we will be scraping books listed on http://books.toscrape.com in the Childrens category (http://books.toscrape.com/catalogue/category/books/childrens_11/index.html). This example is similar to another provided in Chapter 3, where the lxml library was used. The code for this example is available on GitHub: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Web-Scraping-with-Python-Second-Edition/blob/main/Chapter04/example_1.ipynb.

As you can see in Figure 4.3, the Childrens category contains 29 results (a single page shows only 20 results):

Figure 4.3: Childrens category page with 29 results

Figure 4.3: Childrens category page with 29 results

Important note

...