You're reading from Hands-On Web Scraping with Python - Second Edition

Product type Book

Published in Oct 2023

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781837636211

Pages 324 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Concepts

Web Programming

Author (1):

Anish Chapagain

Table of Contents (20) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1:Python and Web Scraping

2. Chapter 1: Web Scraping Fundamentals

3. Chapter 2: Python Programming for Data and Web

4. Part 2:Beginning Web Scraping

5. Chapter 3: Searching and Processing Web Documents

6. Chapter 4: Scraping Using PyQuery, a jQuery-Like Library for Python

7. Chapter 5: Scraping the Web with Scrapy and Beautiful Soup

8. Part 3:Advanced Scraping Concepts

9. Chapter 6: Working with the Secure Web

10. Chapter 7: Data Extraction Using Web APIs

11. Chapter 8: Using Selenium to Scrape the Web

12. Chapter 9: Using Regular Expressions and PDFs

13. Part 4:Advanced Data-Related Concepts

14. Chapter 10: Data Mining, Analysis, and Visualization

15. Chapter 11: Machine Learning and Web Scraping

16. Part 5:Conclusion

17. Chapter 12: After Scraping – Next Steps and Data Analysis

18. Index

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19. Other Books You May Enjoy

Web Scraping Fundamentals

This book about web scraping covers practical concepts with detailed explanations and example code. We will introduce you to the essential topics in extracting or scraping data (that is, high-quality data) from websites, using effective techniques from the web and the Python programming language.

In this chapter, we are going to understand basic concepts related to web scraping. Whether or not you have any prior experience in this domain, you will easily be able to proceed with this chapter.

The discussion of the web or websites in our context refers to pages or documents including text, images, style sheets, scripts, and video contents, built using a markup language such as HTML. It’s almost a container of various content.

The following are a couple of common queries in this context:

Why web scraping?
What is it used for?

Most of us will have come across the concept of data and the benefits or usage of data in deriving information, decision-making, gaining insights from facts, or even knowledge discovery. There has been growing demand for data, or high-quality data, in most industries globally (such as governance, medical sciences, artificial intelligence, agriculture, business, sport, and R&D).

We will learn what exactly web scraping is, explore the techniques and technologies it is associated with, and find and extract data from the web, with the help of the Python programming language, in the chapters ahead.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics: