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 the Web with Scrapy and Beautiful Soup

In previous chapters, we learned about web scraping-related technologies, data-finding techniques, and using various Python libraries to scrape data from the web.

In this chapter, we will explore and learn practically about two popular Python libraries, Scrapy and Beautiful Soup. Scrapy is a web crawling framework for Python and provides a project-oriented scope for web scraping. Beautiful Soup, on the other hand, deals with document or content parsing. Parsing a document is normally done to effectively traverse and extract content. Apart from this, both libraries are heavily loaded with DOM-related features.

In particular, we will learn about the following topics in this chapter:

  • Web parsing using Python
  • Web scraping using Beautiful Soup
  • Web scraping using Scrapy
  • Deploying a web crawler