Python Web Scraping Cookbook

Untangle your web scraping complexities and access web data with ease using Python scripts

Key Features

• Hands-on recipes to advance your web scraping skills to expert level
• Address complex and challenging web scraping tasks using Python
• Understand the web page structure and collect meaningful data from the website with ease

Book Description

Python Web Scraping Cookbook is a solution-focused book that will teach you techniques to develop high-performance scrapers and deal with crawlers, sitemaps, forms automation, Ajax-based sites, and caches.You’ll explore a number of real-world scenarios where every part of the development/product life cycle will be fully covered. You will not only develop the skills to design and develop reliable data flows, but also deploy your codebase to an AWS. If you are involved in software engineering, product development, or data mining (or are interested in building data-driven products), you will find this book useful as each recipe has a clear purpose and objective.

Right from extracting data from the websites to writing a sophisticated web crawler, the book’s independent recipes will be a godsend on the job. This book covers Python libraries, requests, and BeautifulSoup. You will learn about crawling, web spidering, working with AJAX websites, and paginated items. You will also learn to tackle problems such as 403 errors, working with proxy, scraping images, and LXML.

By the end of this book, you will be able to scrape websites more efficiently and deploy and operate your scraper in the cloud.

What you will learn

• Use a wide variety of tools to scrape any website and data-including BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, Selenium, and many more
• Master expression languages such as XPath, CSS, and regular expressions to extract web data
• Deal with scraping traps such as hidden form fields, throttling, pagination, and different status codes
• Build robust scraping pipelines with SQS and RabbitMQ
• Scrape assets such as images media and know what to do when Scraper fails to run
• Explore ETL techniques of building a customized crawler, parser, and convert structured and unstructured data from websites
• Deploy and run your scraper as a service in AWS Elastic Container Service

Who This Book Is For

Python Web Scraping Cookbook is ideal for Python programmers, web administrators, security professionals or someone who wants to perform web analytics would find this book relevant and useful. Familiarity with Python and basic understanding of web scraping would be useful to take full advantage of this book.

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started with Scraping
2. Data Acquisition and Extraction
3. Processing Data
4. Working with Images, Audio and Other Assets
5. Scraping – Code of Conduct
6. Scraping Challenges and Solutions
7. Text Wrangling and Analysis
8. Searching, Mining and Visualizing Data
9. Working with an API and Providing a Data API
10. Creating Scraper Microservices with Docker
11. A Complete Real-World Example