▶Book Description
Web scraping is an essential technique used in many organizations to scrape valuable data from web pages. This book will enable you to delve deeply into web scraping techniques and methodologies.
This book will introduce you to the fundamental concepts of web scraping techniques and how they can be applied to multiple sets of web pages. We'll use powerful libraries from the Python ecosystem―such as Scrapy, lxml, pyquery, bs4, and others―to carry out web scraping operations. We will take an in-depth look at essential tasks to carry out simple to intermediate scraping operations such as identifying information from web pages, using patterns or attributes to retrieve information, and others. This book adopts a practical approach to web scraping concepts and tools, guiding you through a series of use cases and showing you how to use the best tools and techniques to efficiently scrape web pages. This book also covers the use of other popular web scraping tools, such as Selenium, Regex, and web-based APIs.
By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently scrape the web using different techniques with Python and other popular tools.
▶What You Will Learn
- Analyze data and Information from web pages
- Learn how to use browser-based developer tools from the scraping perspective
- Use XPath and CSS selectors to identify and explore markup elements
- Learn to handle and manage cookies
- Explore advanced concepts in handling HTML forms and processing logins
- Optimize web securities, data storage, and API use to scrape data
- Use Regex with Python to extract data
- Deal with complex web entities by using Selenium to find and extract data
▶Key Features
- Learn various scraping techniques using a range of Python libraries such as Scrapy and Beautiful Soup
- Build scrapers and crawlers to extract relevant information from the web
- Automate web scraping operations to bridge the accuracy gap and ease complex business needs
▶Who This Book Is For
This book is for Python programmers, data analysts, web scraping newbies, and anyone who wants to learn how to perform web scraping from scratch. If you want to begin your journey in applying web scraping techniques to a range of web pages, then this book is what you need! A working knowledge of the Python programming language is expected.
▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, Web Scraping Fundamentals, explores some core technologies and tools that are relevant to WWW and that are required for web scraping.
- Chapter 2, Python and the Web – Using URLlib and Requests, demonstrates some of the core features available through the Python libraries such as requests and urllib, in addition to exploring page contents in various formats and structures.
- Chapter 3, Using LXML, XPath, and CSS Selectors, describes various examples using LXML, implementing a variety of techniques and library features to deal with elements and ElementTree.
- Chapter 4, Scraping Using pyquery – a Python Library, goes into more detail regarding web scraping techniques and a number of new Python libraries that deploy these techniques.
- Chapter 5, Web Scraping Using Scrapy and Beautiful Soup, examines various aspects of traversing web documents using Beautiful Soup, while also exploring a framework that was built for crawling activities using spiders, in other words, Scrapy.
- Chapter 6, Working with Secure Web, covers a number of basic security-related measures and techniques that are often encountered and that pose a challenge to web scraping.
- Chapter 7, Data Extraction Using Web-Based APIs, covers the Python programming language and how to interact with the web APIs with regard to data extraction.
- Chapter 8, Using Selenium to Scrape the Web, covers Selenium and how to use it to scrape data from the web.
- Chapter 9, Using Regex to Extract Data, goes into more detail regarding web scraping techniques using regular expressions.
- Chapter 10, Next Steps, introduces and examines basic concepts regarding data management using files, and analysis and visualization using pandas and matplotlib, while also providing an introduction to machine learning and data mining and exploring a number of related resources that can be helpful in terms of further learning and career development.
