Jarmul Katharine - Python web scraping: fetching data from the web

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

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First published: October 2015

Second edition: May 2017

Production reference: 1240517

ISBN 978-1-78646-258-9

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Katharine Jarmul is a data scientist and Pythonista based in Berlin, Germany. She runs a data science consulting company, Kjamistan, that provides services such as data extraction, acquisition, and modelling for small and large companies. She has been writing Python since 2008 and scraping the web with Python since 2010, and has worked at both small and large start-ups who use web scraping for data analysis and machine learning. When she's not scraping the web, you can follow her thoughts and activities via Twitter (@kjam) or on her blog: https://blog.kjamistan.com.

Richard Lawson is from Australia and studied Computer Science at the University of Melbourne. Since graduating, he built a business specializing in web scraping while travelling the world, working remotely from over 50 countries. He is a fluent Esperanto speaker, conversational in Mandarin and Korean, and active in contributing to and translating open source software. He is currently undertaking postgraduate studies at Oxford University and in his spare time enjoys developing autonomous drones. You can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpenman.

Dimitrios Kouzis-Loukas has over fifteen years of experience providing software systems to small and big organisations. His most recent projects are typically distributed systems with ultra-low latency and high-availability requirements. He is language agnostic, yet he has a slight preference for C++ and Python. A firm believer in open source, he hopes that his contributions will benefit individual communities as well as all of humanity.

Lazar Telebak is a freelance web developer specializing in web scraping, crawling, and indexing web pages using Python libraries/frameworks.

He has worked mostly on a projects that deal with automation and website scraping, crawling and exporting data to various formats including: CSV, JSON, XML, TXT and databases such as: MongoDB, SQLAlchemy, Postgres.

Lazar also has experience of fronted technologies and languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery.

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The internet contains the most useful set of data ever assembled, largely publicly accessible for free. However this data is not easily re-usable. It is embedded within the structure and style of websites and needs to be extracted to be useful. This process of extracting data from webpages is known as web scraping and is becoming increasingly useful as ever more information is available online.

All code used has been tested with Python 3.4+ and is available for download at https://github.com/kjam/wswp.

, Introduction to Web Scraping, introduces what is web scraping and how to crawl a website.

, Scraping the Data, shows you how to extract data from webpages using several libraries.

, Caching Downloads, teaches how to avoid re downloading by caching results.

, Concurrent Downloading, helps you how to scrape data faster by downloading websites in parallel.

, Dynamic Content