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Hands-On Web Scraping with Python

You're reading from   Hands-On Web Scraping with Python Perform advanced scraping operations using various Python libraries and tools such as Selenium, Regex, and others

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2019
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789533392
Length 350 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Anish Chapagain Anish Chapagain
Author Profile Icon Anish Chapagain
Anish Chapagain
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Table of Contents (16) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1: Introduction to Web Scraping FREE CHAPTER
2. Web Scraping Fundamentals 3. Section 2: Beginning Web Scraping
4. Python and the Web – Using urllib and Requests 5. Using LXML, XPath, and CSS Selectors 6. Scraping Using pyquery – a Python Library 7. Web Scraping Using Scrapy and Beautiful Soup 8. Section 3: Advanced Concepts
9. Working with Secure Web 10. Data Extraction Using Web-Based APIs 11. Using Selenium to Scrape the Web 12. Using Regex to Extract Data 13. Section 4: Conclusion
14. Next Steps 15. Other Books You May Enjoy

Using LXML, XPath, and CSS Selectors

So far, we have learned about web-development technologies, data-finding techniques, and accessing web content using the Python programming language.

Web-based content exists in parts or elements using some predefined document expressions. Analyzing these parts for patterns is a major task for processing convenient scraping. Elements can be searched and identified with XPath and CSS selectors that are processed with scraping logic for required content. lxml will be used to process elements inside markup documents. We will be using browser-based development tools for content reading and element identification.

In this chapter, we will learn the following:

  • Introduction to XPath and CSS selectors
  • Using browser developer tools
  • Learning and scraping using the Python lxml library
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