Hands-On Web Scraping with Python

Collect and scrape different complexities of data from the modern Web using the latest tools, best practices, and techniques

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

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

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.

Table of Contents

1. Web Scraping Fundamentals
2. Python and the Web - Using urllib and Requests
3. Using LXML, XPath, and CSS Selectors
4. Scraping Using pyquery - a Python Library
5. Web Scraping Using Scrapy and Beautiful Soup
6. Working with Secure Web
7. Data Extraction Using Web-Based APIs
8. Using Selenium to Scrape the Web
9. Using Regex to Extract Data
10. Next Steps

Anish Chapagain is a software engineer with a passion for data science, its processes, and Python programming, which began around 2007. He has been working with web scraping and analysis-related tasks for more than 5 years, and is currently pursuing freelance projects in the web scraping domain. Anish previously worked as a trainer, web/software developer, and as a banker, where he was exposed to data and gained further insights into topics including data analysis, visualization, data mining, information processing, and knowledge discovery. He has an MSc in computer systems from Bangor University (University of Wales), United Kingdom, and an Executive MBA from Himalayan Whitehouse International College, Kathmandu, Nepal.