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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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Toc

Automated scraping with Scrapely


For scraping the annotated fields Portia uses a library called Scrapely, which is a useful open-source tool developed independently of Portia and is available at https://github.com/scrapy/scrapely. Scrapely uses training data to build a model of what to scrape from a web page, and then this model can be applied to scrape other web pages with the same structure in future. Here is an example to show how it works:

(portia_example)$ python
>>> from scrapely import Scraper
>>> s = Scraper()
>>> train_url = 'http://example.webscraping.com/view/Afghanistan-1'
>>> s.train(train_url, {'name': 'Afghanistan', 'population': '29,121,286'})
>>> test_url = 'http://example.webscraping.com/view/United-Kingdom-239'
>>> s.scrape(test_url)
[{u'name': [u'United Kingdom'], u'population': [u'62,348,447']}]

First, Scrapely is given the data we want to scrape from the Afghanistan web page to train the model, being the country...

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