Search icon CANCEL
Subscription
0
Cart icon
Your Cart (0 item)
Close icon
You have no products in your basket yet
Save more on your purchases now! discount-offer-chevron-icon
Savings automatically calculated. No voucher code required.
Arrow left icon
Explore Products
Best Sellers
New Releases
Books
Videos
Audiobooks
Learning Hub
Conferences
Free Learning
Arrow right icon
Python Web Scraping Cookbook
Python Web Scraping Cookbook

Python Web Scraping Cookbook: Over 90 proven recipes to get you scraping with Python, microservices, Docker, and AWS

eBook
€17.99 €26.99
Paperback
€32.99
Subscription
Free Trial
Renews at €18.99p/m

What do you get with Print?

Product feature icon Instant access to your digital eBook copy whilst your Print order is Shipped
Product feature icon Paperback book shipped to your preferred address
Product feature icon Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats
Product feature icon Access this title in our online reader with advanced features
Product feature icon DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want
Table of content icon View table of contents Preview book icon Preview Book

Python Web Scraping Cookbook

Data Acquisition and Extraction

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • How to parse websites and navigate the DOM using BeautifulSoup
  • Searching the DOM with Beautiful Soup's find methods
  • Querying the DOM with XPath and lxml
  • Querying data with XPath and CSS Selectors
  • Using Scrapy selectors
  • Loading data in Unicode / UTF-8 format

Introduction

The key aspects for effective scraping are understanding how content and data are stored on web servers, identifying the data you want to retrieve, and understanding how the tools support this extraction. In this chapter, we will discuss website structures and the DOM, introduce techniques to parse, and query websites with lxml, XPath, and CSS. We will also look at how to work with websites developed in other languages and different encoding types such as Unicode.

Ultimately, understanding how to find and extract data within an HTML document comes down to understanding the structure of the HTML page, its representation in the DOM, the process of querying the DOM for specific elements, and how to specify which elements you want to retrieve based upon how the data is represented.

How to parse websites and navigate the DOM using BeautifulSoup

When the browser displays a web page it builds a model of the content of the page in a representation known as the document object model (DOM). The DOM is a hierarchical representation of the page's entire content, as well as structural information, style information, scripts, and links to other content.

It is critical to understand this structure to be able to effectively scrape data from web pages. We will look at an example web page, its DOM, and examine how to navigate the DOM with Beautiful Soup.

Getting ready

We will use a small web site that is included in the www folder of the sample code. To follow along, start a web server from within the www folder...

Searching the DOM with Beautiful Soup's find methods

We can perform simple searches of the DOM using Beautiful Soup's find methods. These methods give us a much more flexible and powerful construct for finding elements that are not dependent upon the hierarchy of those elements. In this recipe we will examine several common uses of these functions to locate various elements in the DOM.

Getting ready

ff you want to cut and paste the following into ipython, you can find the samples in 02/02_bs4_find.py.

How to do it...

We will start with a fresh iPython session...

Querying the DOM with XPath and lxml

XPath is a query language for selecting nodes from an XML document and is a must-learn query language for anyone performing web scraping. XPath offers a number of benefits to its user over other model-based tools:

  • Can easily navigate through the DOM tree
  • More sophisticated and powerful than other selectors like CSS selectors and regular expressions
  • It has a great set (200+) of built-in functions and is extensible with custom functions
  • It is widely supported by parsing libraries and scraping platforms

XPath contains seven data models (we have seen some of them previously):

  • root node (top level parent node)
  • element nodes (<a>..</a>)
  • attribute nodes (href="example.html")
  • text nodes ("this is a text")
  • comment nodes (<!-- a comment -->)
  • namespace nodes
  • processing instruction nodes

XPath expressions can...

Querying data with XPath and CSS selectors

CSS selectors are patterns used for selecting elements and are often used to define the elements that styles should be applied to. They can also be used with lxml to select nodes in the DOM. CSS selectors are commonly used as they are more compact than XPath and generally can be more reusable in code. Examples of common selectors which may be used are as follows:

What you are looking for Example
All tags *
A specific tag (that is, tr) .planet
A class name (that is, "planet") tr.planet
A tag with an ID "planet3" tr#planet3
A child tr of a table table tr
A descendant tr of a table table tr
A tag with an attribute (that is, tr with id="planet4") a[id=Mars]

Getting ready

...

Using Scrapy selectors

Scrapy is a Python web spider framework that is used to extract data from websites. It provides many powerful features for navigating entire websites, such as the ability to follow links. One feature it provides is the ability to find data within a document using the DOM, and using the now, quite familiar, XPath.

In this recipe we will load the list of current questions on StackOverflow, and then parse this using a scrapy selector. Using that selector, we will extract the text of each question.

Getting ready

The code for this recipe is in 02/05_scrapy_selectors.py.

How to do it...

...

Loading data in unicode / UTF-8

A document's encoding tells an application how the characters in the document are represented as bytes in the file. Essentially, the encoding specifies how many bits there are per character. In a standard ASCII document, all characters are 8 bits. HTML files are often encoded as 8 bits per character, but with the globalization of the internet, this is not always the case. Many HTML documents are encoded as 16-bit characters, or use a combination of 8- and 16-bit characters.

A particularly common form HTML document encoding is referred to as UTF-8. This is the encoding form that we will examine.

Getting ready

We will read a file named unicode.html from our local web server, located at http...

Left arrow icon Right arrow icon
Download code icon Download Code

Key benefits

  • Hands-on recipes for advancing your web scraping skills to expert level
  • One-stop solution guide to address complex and challenging web scraping tasks using Python
  • Understand web page structures and collect data from a website with ease

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, caches, and more. 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 needed to design and develop reliable performance data flows, but also deploy your codebase to 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. This book covers Python libraries, requests, and BeautifulSoup. You will learn about crawling, web spidering, working with Ajax websites, paginated items, and more. 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 able to deploy and operate your scraper in the cloud.

Who is this book for?

This book is ideal for Python programmers, web administrators, security professionals, and anyone who wants to perform web analytics. Familiarity with Python and basic understanding of web scraping will be useful to make the best of this book.

What you will learn

  • Use a variety of tools to scrape any website and data, including BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, Selenium and many more
  • Master expression languages, such as XPath and 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 like image media and learn 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
Estimated delivery fee Deliver to Sweden

Premium delivery 7 - 10 business days

€17.95
(Includes tracking information)

Product Details

Country selected
Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Feb 09, 2018
Length: 364 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781787285217
Category :
Languages :
Concepts :
Tools :

What do you get with Print?

Product feature icon Instant access to your digital eBook copy whilst your Print order is Shipped
Product feature icon Paperback book shipped to your preferred address
Product feature icon Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats
Product feature icon Access this title in our online reader with advanced features
Product feature icon DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want
Estimated delivery fee Deliver to Sweden

Premium delivery 7 - 10 business days

€17.95
(Includes tracking information)

Product Details

Publication date : Feb 09, 2018
Length: 364 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781787285217
Category :
Languages :
Concepts :
Tools :

Packt Subscriptions

See our plans and pricing
Modal Close icon
€18.99 billed monthly
Feature tick icon Unlimited access to Packt's library of 7,000+ practical books and videos
Feature tick icon Constantly refreshed with 50+ new titles a month
Feature tick icon Exclusive Early access to books as they're written
Feature tick icon Solve problems while you work with advanced search and reference features
Feature tick icon Offline reading on the mobile app
Feature tick icon Simple pricing, no contract
€189.99 billed annually
Feature tick icon Unlimited access to Packt's library of 7,000+ practical books and videos
Feature tick icon Constantly refreshed with 50+ new titles a month
Feature tick icon Exclusive Early access to books as they're written
Feature tick icon Solve problems while you work with advanced search and reference features
Feature tick icon Offline reading on the mobile app
Feature tick icon Choose a DRM-free eBook or Video every month to keep
Feature tick icon PLUS own as many other DRM-free eBooks or Videos as you like for just €5 each
Feature tick icon Exclusive print discounts
€264.99 billed in 18 months
Feature tick icon Unlimited access to Packt's library of 7,000+ practical books and videos
Feature tick icon Constantly refreshed with 50+ new titles a month
Feature tick icon Exclusive Early access to books as they're written
Feature tick icon Solve problems while you work with advanced search and reference features
Feature tick icon Offline reading on the mobile app
Feature tick icon Choose a DRM-free eBook or Video every month to keep
Feature tick icon PLUS own as many other DRM-free eBooks or Videos as you like for just €5 each
Feature tick icon Exclusive print discounts

Frequently bought together


Stars icon
Total 95.97
Python Web Scraping
€29.99
Python Machine Learning, Second Edition
€32.99
Python Web Scraping Cookbook
€32.99
Total 95.97 Stars icon

Table of Contents

12 Chapters
Getting Started with Scraping Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Data Acquisition and Extraction Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Processing Data Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Working with Images, Audio, and other Assets Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Scraping - Code of Conduct Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Scraping Challenges and Solutions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Text Wrangling and Analysis Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Searching, Mining and Visualizing Data Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating a Simple Data API Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating Scraper Microservices with Docker Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Making the Scraper as a Service Real Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2.3
(3 Ratings)
5 star 33.3%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 66.7%
Patrick Klein Jan 08, 2022
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
This "book" feels like a collection of Stack Overflow answers to very basic topics with the added disadvantages that it's harder to navigate and you can't just copy-paste.I'm sending this one back.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
John Ewers Apr 17, 2018
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
I bought book trying to learn how I could download a few tables from the web into python. I had 2 issues that I needed help with: 1) sites that i need data from require passwords 2) sites have javascript that needs to run before I can grab data. After 4 hours, I got absolutely nothing out of this book and went to youtube / stack overflow (w/ these tools, I figured out my problem in less time than I spent w/ this book)The book starts off by going over a few details on many different scraping libraries. There isn't enough detail to do anything useful w/ webscraping, you just become aware of the existence of this libraries. The 2nd 2/3rds of the book focus exclusively with 'scrappy'. This appears to be a good resource for crawling (finding new websites to go onto); however, not so good for scraping known sites (certainly not for beginner / intermediate python users). If you want to go crawling, this may be a good book for you. I was stunned that reading HTML behind the sites you want to scrape was barely mentioned. This is a key element of any "how to" you can find on youtube and wo a lot of html experience, one of the more challenging parts of scraping.One of my biggest issues was w/ passwords. Book only offered 1/2 a page on this w/ an extremely simple example. Solution did not work on any of the 3 sites I tried it on. Also, I coudl not find 1 mention of what to do w/ javascript.Overall, useless book for me
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Tonya Oliver Mar 26, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
It's probably worth the read. I don't like the fact that Amazon is forcing me to write this review with no less than 18 words. It's too bad because the book isn't being reviewed here it's Amazon. How's that for 18 words Amazon?
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Get free access to Packt library with over 7500+ books and video courses for 7 days!
Start Free Trial

FAQs

What is the delivery time and cost of print book? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Shipping Details

USA:

'

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the US within 10-15 business days

Premium: Trackable Delivery to most addresses in the US within 3-8 business days

UK:

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 7-9 business days.
Shipments are not trackable

Premium: Trackable delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 3-4 business days!
Add one extra business day for deliveries to Northern Ireland and Scottish Highlands and islands

EU:

Premium: Trackable delivery to most EU destinations within 4-9 business days.

Australia:

Economy: Can deliver to P. O. Boxes and private residences.
Trackable service with delivery to addresses in Australia only.
Delivery time ranges from 7-9 business days for VIC and 8-10 business days for Interstate metro
Delivery time is up to 15 business days for remote areas of WA, NT & QLD.

Premium: Delivery to addresses in Australia only
Trackable delivery to most P. O. Boxes and private residences in Australia within 4-5 days based on the distance to a destination following dispatch.

India:

Premium: Delivery to most Indian addresses within 5-6 business days

Rest of the World:

Premium: Countries in the American continent: Trackable delivery to most countries within 4-7 business days

Asia:

Premium: Delivery to most Asian addresses within 5-9 business days

Disclaimer:
All orders received before 5 PM U.K time would start printing from the next business day. So the estimated delivery times start from the next day as well. Orders received after 5 PM U.K time (in our internal systems) on a business day or anytime on the weekend will begin printing the second to next business day. For example, an order placed at 11 AM today will begin printing tomorrow, whereas an order placed at 9 PM tonight will begin printing the day after tomorrow.


Unfortunately, due to several restrictions, we are unable to ship to the following countries:

  1. Afghanistan
  2. American Samoa
  3. Belarus
  4. Brunei Darussalam
  5. Central African Republic
  6. The Democratic Republic of Congo
  7. Eritrea
  8. Guinea-bissau
  9. Iran
  10. Lebanon
  11. Libiya Arab Jamahriya
  12. Somalia
  13. Sudan
  14. Russian Federation
  15. Syrian Arab Republic
  16. Ukraine
  17. Venezuela
What is custom duty/charge? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customs duty are charges levied on goods when they cross international borders. It is a tax that is imposed on imported goods. These duties are charged by special authorities and bodies created by local governments and are meant to protect local industries, economies, and businesses.

Do I have to pay customs charges for the print book order? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

The orders shipped to the countries that are listed under EU27 will not bear custom charges. They are paid by Packt as part of the order.

List of EU27 countries: www.gov.uk/eu-eea:

A custom duty or localized taxes may be applicable on the shipment and would be charged by the recipient country outside of the EU27 which should be paid by the customer and these duties are not included in the shipping charges been charged on the order.

How do I know my custom duty charges? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

The amount of duty payable varies greatly depending on the imported goods, the country of origin and several other factors like the total invoice amount or dimensions like weight, and other such criteria applicable in your country.

For example:

  • If you live in Mexico, and the declared value of your ordered items is over $ 50, for you to receive a package, you will have to pay additional import tax of 19% which will be $ 9.50 to the courier service.
  • Whereas if you live in Turkey, and the declared value of your ordered items is over € 22, for you to receive a package, you will have to pay additional import tax of 18% which will be € 3.96 to the courier service.
How can I cancel my order? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Cancellation Policy for Published Printed Books:

You can cancel any order within 1 hour of placing the order. Simply contact customercare@packt.com with your order details or payment transaction id. If your order has already started the shipment process, we will do our best to stop it. However, if it is already on the way to you then when you receive it, you can contact us at customercare@packt.com using the returns and refund process.

Please understand that Packt Publishing cannot provide refunds or cancel any order except for the cases described in our Return Policy (i.e. Packt Publishing agrees to replace your printed book because it arrives damaged or material defect in book), Packt Publishing will not accept returns.

What is your returns and refunds policy? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Return Policy:

We want you to be happy with your purchase from Packtpub.com. We will not hassle you with returning print books to us. If the print book you receive from us is incorrect, damaged, doesn't work or is unacceptably late, please contact Customer Relations Team on customercare@packt.com with the order number and issue details as explained below:

  1. If you ordered (eBook, Video or Print Book) incorrectly or accidentally, please contact Customer Relations Team on customercare@packt.com within one hour of placing the order and we will replace/refund you the item cost.
  2. Sadly, if your eBook or Video file is faulty or a fault occurs during the eBook or Video being made available to you, i.e. during download then you should contact Customer Relations Team within 14 days of purchase on customercare@packt.com who will be able to resolve this issue for you.
  3. You will have a choice of replacement or refund of the problem items.(damaged, defective or incorrect)
  4. Once Customer Care Team confirms that you will be refunded, you should receive the refund within 10 to 12 working days.
  5. If you are only requesting a refund of one book from a multiple order, then we will refund you the appropriate single item.
  6. Where the items were shipped under a free shipping offer, there will be no shipping costs to refund.

On the off chance your printed book arrives damaged, with book material defect, contact our Customer Relation Team on customercare@packt.com within 14 days of receipt of the book with appropriate evidence of damage and we will work with you to secure a replacement copy, if necessary. Please note that each printed book you order from us is individually made by Packt's professional book-printing partner which is on a print-on-demand basis.

What tax is charged? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Currently, no tax is charged on the purchase of any print book (subject to change based on the laws and regulations). A localized VAT fee is charged only to our European and UK customers on eBooks, Video and subscriptions that they buy. GST is charged to Indian customers for eBooks and video purchases.

What payment methods can I use? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

You can pay with the following card types:

  1. Visa Debit
  2. Visa Credit
  3. MasterCard
  4. PayPal
What is the delivery time and cost of print books? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Shipping Details

USA:

'

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the US within 10-15 business days

Premium: Trackable Delivery to most addresses in the US within 3-8 business days

UK:

Economy: Delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 7-9 business days.
Shipments are not trackable

Premium: Trackable delivery to most addresses in the U.K. within 3-4 business days!
Add one extra business day for deliveries to Northern Ireland and Scottish Highlands and islands

EU:

Premium: Trackable delivery to most EU destinations within 4-9 business days.

Australia:

Economy: Can deliver to P. O. Boxes and private residences.
Trackable service with delivery to addresses in Australia only.
Delivery time ranges from 7-9 business days for VIC and 8-10 business days for Interstate metro
Delivery time is up to 15 business days for remote areas of WA, NT & QLD.

Premium: Delivery to addresses in Australia only
Trackable delivery to most P. O. Boxes and private residences in Australia within 4-5 days based on the distance to a destination following dispatch.

India:

Premium: Delivery to most Indian addresses within 5-6 business days

Rest of the World:

Premium: Countries in the American continent: Trackable delivery to most countries within 4-7 business days

Asia:

Premium: Delivery to most Asian addresses within 5-9 business days

Disclaimer:
All orders received before 5 PM U.K time would start printing from the next business day. So the estimated delivery times start from the next day as well. Orders received after 5 PM U.K time (in our internal systems) on a business day or anytime on the weekend will begin printing the second to next business day. For example, an order placed at 11 AM today will begin printing tomorrow, whereas an order placed at 9 PM tonight will begin printing the day after tomorrow.


Unfortunately, due to several restrictions, we are unable to ship to the following countries:

  1. Afghanistan
  2. American Samoa
  3. Belarus
  4. Brunei Darussalam
  5. Central African Republic
  6. The Democratic Republic of Congo
  7. Eritrea
  8. Guinea-bissau
  9. Iran
  10. Lebanon
  11. Libiya Arab Jamahriya
  12. Somalia
  13. Sudan
  14. Russian Federation
  15. Syrian Arab Republic
  16. Ukraine
  17. Venezuela