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 Beautiful Soup

In this section, we will build and execute a web crawler using Beautiful Soup. To set things up, we have chosen to scrape quotes from http://quotes.toscrape.com. Specifically, we will be scraping from the page http://quotes.toscrape.com/tag/inspirational, as seen in Figure 5.3:

Figure 5.3: Category “inspirational”

Figure 5.3: Category “inspirational”

The example we are dealing with is similar to Example 3 – scraping quotes with author details in Chapter 4. Only the links and compositions have changed, by carrying out a few additional logical steps. The code for the example can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Web-Scraping-with-Python-Second-Edition/blob/main/Chapter05/bs4_scraping.ipynb.

The following code declares the paginated link as url, and columns contains a column header for the CSV file to be generated:

url = "http://quotes.toscrape.com/tag/inspirational/page/"
columns=['id&apos...