Learn web scraping and crawling techniques to access unlimited data from any web source in any format. With this practical guide, you’ll learn how to use Python scripts and web APIs to gather and process data from thousands—or even millions—of web pages at once. Ideal for programmers, security professionals, and web administrators familiar with Python, this book not only teaches basic web scraping mechanics, but also delves into more advanced topics, such as analyzing raw data or using scrapers for frontend website testing. Code samples are available to help you understand the concepts in practice. Learn how to parse complicated HTML pages Traverse multiple pages and sites Get a general overview of APIs and how they work Learn several methods for storing the data you scrape Download, read, and extract data from documents Use tools and techniques to clean badly formatted data Read and write natural languages Crawl through forms and logins Understand how to scrape JavaScript Learn image processing and text recognition

Collect and scrape different complexities of data from the modern Web using the latest tools, best practices, and techniques Key Features Learn different scraping techniques using a range of Python libraries such as Scrapy and Beautiful Soup Build scrapers and crawlers to extract relevant information from the web Automate web scraping operations to bridge the accuracy gap and manage complex business needs Book DescriptionWeb scraping is an essential technique used in many organizations to gather valuable data from web pages. This book will enable you to delve into web scraping techniques and methodologies. The book will introduce you to the fundamental concepts of web scraping techniques and how they can be applied to multiple sets of web pages. You'll use powerful libraries from the Python ecosystem such as Scrapy, lxml, pyquery, and bs4 to carry out web scraping operations. You will then get up to speed with simple to intermediate scraping operations such as identifying information from web pages and using patterns or attributes to retrieve information. This book adopts a practical approach to web scraping concepts and tools, guiding you through a series of use cases and showing you how to use the best tools and techniques to efficiently scrape web pages. You'll even cover the use of other popular web scraping tools, such as Selenium, Regex, and web-based APIs. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently scrape the web using different techniques with Python and other popular tools.What you will learn Analyze data and information from web pages Learn how to use browser-based developer tools from the scraping perspective Use XPath and CSS selectors to identify and explore markup elements Learn to handle and manage cookies Explore advanced concepts in handling HTML forms and processing logins Optimize web securities, data storage, and API use to scrape data Use Regex with Python to extract data Deal with complex web entities by using Selenium to find and extract data Who this book is for This book is for Python programmers, data analysts, web scraping newbies, and anyone who wants to learn how to perform web scraping from scratch. If you want to begin your journey in applying web scraping techniques to a range of web pages, then this book is what you need! A working knowledge of the Python programming language is expected.

Successfully scrape data from any website with the power of Python About This Book A hands-on guide to web scraping with real-life problems and solutions Techniques to download and extract data from complex websites Create a number of different web scrapers to extract information Who This Book Is For This book is aimed at developers who want to use web scraping for legitimate purposes. Prior programming experience with Python would be useful but not essential. Anyone with general knowledge of programming languages should be able to pick up the book and understand the principals involved. What You Will Learn Extract data from web pages with simple Python programming Build a threaded crawler to process web pages in parallel Follow links to crawl a website Download cache to reduce bandwidth Use multiple threads and processes to scrape faster Learn how to parse JavaScript-dependent websites Interact with forms and sessions Solve CAPTCHAs on protected web pages Discover how to track the state of a crawl In Detail The Internet contains the most useful set of data ever assembled, largely publicly accessible for free. However, this data is not easily reusable. It is embedded within the structure and style of websites and needs to be carefully extracted to be useful. Web scraping is becoming increasingly useful as a means to easily gather and make sense of the plethora of information available online. Using a simple language like Python, you can crawl the information out of complex websites using simple programming. This book is the ultimate guide to using Python to scrape data from websites. In the early chapters it covers how to extract data from static web pages and how to use caching to manage the load on servers. After the basics we'll get our hands dirty with building a more sophisticated crawler with threads and more advanced topics. Learn step-by-step how to use Ajax URLs, employ the Firebug extension for monitoring, and indirectly scrape data. Discover more scraping nitty-gritties such as using the browser renderer, managing cookies, how to submit forms to extract data from complex websites protected by CAPTCHA, and so on. The book wraps up with how to create high-level scrapers with Scrapy libraries and implement what has been learned to real websites. Style and approach This book is a hands-on guide with real-life examples and solutions starting simple and then progressively becoming more complex. Each chapter in this book introduces a problem and then provides one or more possible solutions.

Successfully scrape data from any website with the power of Python 3.x About This Book A hands-on guide to web scraping using Python with solutions to real-world problems Create a number of different web scrapers in Python to extract information This book includes practical examples on using the popular and well-maintained libraries in Python for your web scraping needs Who This Book Is For This book is aimed at developers who want to use web scraping for legitimate purposes. Prior programming experience with Python would be useful but not essential. Anyone with general knowledge of programming languages should be able to pick up the book and understand the principals involved. What You Will Learn Extract data from web pages with simple Python programming Build a concurrent crawler to process web pages in parallel Follow links to crawl a website Extract features from the HTML Cache downloaded HTML for reuse Compare concurrent models to determine the fastest crawler Find out how to parse JavaScript-dependent websites Interact with forms and sessions In Detail The Internet contains the most useful set of data ever assembled, most of which is publicly accessible for free. However, this data is not easily usable. It is embedded within the structure and style of websites and needs to be carefully extracted. Web scraping is becoming increasingly useful as a means to gather and make sense of the wealth of information available online. This book is the ultimate guide to using the latest features of Python 3.x to scrape data from websites. In the early chapters, you'll see how to extract data from static web pages. You'll learn to use caching with databases and files to save time and manage the load on servers. After covering the basics, you'll get hands-on practice building a more sophisticated crawler using browsers, crawlers, and concurrent scrapers. You'll determine when and how to scrape data from a JavaScript-dependent website using PyQt and Selenium. You'll get a better understanding of how to submit forms on complex websites protected by CAPTCHA. You'll find out how to automate these actions with Python packages such as mechanize. You'll also learn how to create class-based scrapers with Scrapy libraries and implement your learning on real websites. By the end of the book, you will have explored testing websites with scrapers, remote scraping, best practices, working with images, and many other relevant topics. Style and approach This hands-on guide is full of real-life examples and solutions starting simple and then progressively becoming more complex. Each chapter in this book introduces a problem and then provides one or more possible solutions.

This book provides a complete and modern guide to web scraping, using Python as the programming language, without glossing over important details or best practices. Written with a data science audience in mind, the book explores both scraping and the larger context of web technologies in which it operates, to ensure full understanding. The authors recommend web scraping as a powerful tool for any data scientist’s arsenal, as many data science projects start by obtaining an appropriate data set. Starting with a brief overview on scraping and real-life use cases, the authors explore the core concepts of HTTP, HTML, and CSS to provide a solid foundation. Along with a quick Python primer, they cover Selenium for JavaScript-heavy sites, and web crawling in detail. The book finishes with a recap of best practices and a collection of examples that bring together everything you've learned and illustrate various data science use cases. What You'll Learn Leverage well-established best practices and commonly-used Python packages Handle today's web, including JavaScript, cookies, and common web scraping mitigation techniques Understand the managerial and legal concerns regarding web scraping Who This Book is For A data science oriented audience that is probably already familiar with Python or another programming language or analytical toolkit (R, SAS, SPSS, etc). Students or instructors in university courses may also benefit. Readers unfamiliar with Python will appreciate a quick Python primer in chapter 1 to catch up with the basics and provide pointers to other guides as well.

While Excel remains ubiquitous in the business world, recent Microsoft feedback forums are full of requests to include Python as an Excel scripting language. In fact, it's the top feature requested. What makes this combination so compelling? In this hands-on guide, Felix Zumstein--creator of xlwings, a popular open source package for automating Excel with Python--shows experienced Excel users how to integrate these two worlds efficiently. Excel has added quite a few new capabilities over the past couple of years, but its automation language, VBA, stopped evolving a long time ago. Many Excel power users have already adopted Python for daily automation tasks. This guide gets you started. Use Python without extensive programming knowledge Get started with modern tools, including Jupyter notebooks and Visual Studio code Use pandas to acquire, clean, and analyze data and replace typical Excel calculations Automate tedious tasks like consolidation of Excel workbooks and production of Excel reports Use xlwings to build interactive Excel tools that use Python as a calculation engine Connect Excel to databases and CSV files and fetch data from the internet using Python code Use Python as a single tool to replace VBA, Power Query, and Power Pivot

Offering road-tested techniques for website scraping and solutions to common issues developers may face, this concise and focused book provides tips and tweaking guidance for the popular scraping tools BeautifulSoup and Scrapy. --