Hands-On Web Scraping with Python

Collect and scrape different complexities of data from the modern Web using the latest tools best practices and techniquesKey FeaturesLearn various scraping techniques using a range of Python libraries such as Scrapy and Beautiful SoupBuild scrapers and crawlers to extract relevant information from the webAutomate web scraping operations to bridge the accuracy gap and ease complex business needsBook DescriptionWeb 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 learnAnalyze data and Information from web pagesLearn how to use browser-based developer tools from the scraping perspectiveUse XPath and CSS selectors to identify and explore markup elementsLearn to handle and manage cookiesExplore advanced concepts in handling HTML forms and processing loginsOptimize web securities data storage and API use to scrape dataUse Regex with Python to extract dataDeal with complex web entities by using Selenium to find and extract dataWho this book is forThis 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. About the Author 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.