Hands-On Web Scraping with Python

Book excerpt: Collect and scrape different complexities of data from the modern Web using the latest tools, best practices, and techniques Key Features Learn different 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 manage complex business needs Book DescriptionWeb scraping is an essential technique used in many organizations to gather valuable data from web pages. This book will enable you to delve into web scraping techniques and methodologies. The book will introduce you to the fundamental concepts of web scraping techniques and how they can be applied to multiple sets of web pages. You'll use powerful libraries from the Python ecosystem such as Scrapy, lxml, pyquery, and bs4 to carry out web scraping operations. You will then get up to speed with simple to intermediate scraping operations such as identifying information from web pages and using patterns or attributes to retrieve information. 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. You'll even cover 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.