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

Deploying a web crawler

We have successfully implemented a crawler and extracted and exported data to external files using Scrapy (with the help of the scrapy CLI tool). This process has been done on a local machine or Personal Computer (PC). Deploying a crawler online or on a server is the only option for most developers. The deployed crawler benefits from multiple features of the server (such as having access anytime and anywhere, speed, and ample storage), as well as its dynamic nature.

We can choose any cloud platform, web hosting server, or internet-based service to upload our code and execute it. Most of these services are not 100% free; we have to pay a certain amount for the desired configuration and services.

Scrapy, from the beginning, has been famous for its architecture. There were and are still multiple web-based platforms that allow users to run their Scrapy-based projects. One of these is Scrapinghub (now Zyte). Zyte Scrapy Cloud (https://www.zyte.com/scrapy-cloud...