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Python Web Scraping

You're reading from   Python Web Scraping Successfully scrape data from any website with the power of Python

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Product type Paperback
Published in Oct 2015
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781782164364
Length 174 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Richard Penman Richard Penman
Author Profile Icon Richard Penman
Richard Penman
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Chapter 2. Scraping the Data

In the preceding chapter, we built a crawler that follows links to download the web pages we want. This is interesting but not useful—the crawler downloads a web page, and then discards the result. Now, we need to make this crawler achieve something by extracting data from each web page, which is known as scraping.

We will first cover a browser extension called Firebug Lite to examine a web page, which you may already be familiar with if you have a web development background. Then, we will walk through three approaches to extract data from a web page using regular expressions, Beautiful Soup and lxml. Finally, the chapter will conclude with a comparison of these three scraping alternatives.

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