- Python Web Scraping Tutorial
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- Python Web Scraping Resources
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Analyzing a web page means understanding its sructure . Now, the question arises why it is important for web scraping? In this chapter, let us understand this in detail.
Web page Analysis
Web page analysis is important because without analyzing we are not able to know in which form we are going to receive the data from (structured or unstructured) that web page after extraction. We can do web page analysis in the following ways −
Web Data Extraction Software
Viewing Page Source
This is a way to understand how a web page is structured by examining its source code. To implement this, we need to right click the page and then must select the View page source option. Then, we will get the data of our interest from that web page in the form of HTML. But the main concern is about whitespaces and formatting which is difficult for us to format.
Inspecting Page Source by Clicking Inspect Element Option
This is another way of analyzing web page. But the difference is that it will resolve the issue of formatting and whitespaces in the source code of web page. You can implement this by right clicking and then selecting the Inspect or Inspect element option from menu. It will provide the information about particular area or element of that web page.
Different Ways to Extract Data from Web Page
The following methods are mostly used for extracting data from a web page −
Regular Expression
They are highly specialized programming language embedded in Python. We can use it through re module of Python. It is also called RE or regexes or regex patterns. With the help of regular expressions, we can specify some rules for the possible set of strings we want to match from the data.
If you want to learn more about regular expression in general, go to the link https://www.tutorialspoint.com/automata_theory/regular_expressions.htm and if you want to know more about re module or regular expression in Python, you can follow thelink https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_reg_expressions.htm.
Example
In the following example, we are going to scrape data about India fromhttp://example.webscraping.com after matching the contents of <td> with the help of regular expression.
Output
The corresponding output will be as shown here −
Observe that in the above output you can see the details about country India by using regular expression.
Beautiful Soup
Suppose we want to collect all the hyperlinks from a web page, then we can use a parser called BeautifulSoup which can be known in more detail at https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/. In simple words, BeautifulSoup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It can be used with requests, because it needs an input (document or url) to create a soup object asit cannot fetch a web page by itself. You can use the following Python script to gather the title of web page and hyperlinks.
Installing Beautiful Soup
Using the pip command, we can install beautifulsoup either in our virtual environment or in global installation.
Example
Note that in this example, we are extending the above example implemented with requests python module. we are using r.text for creating a soup object which will further be used to fetch details like title of the webpage.
First, we need to import necessary Python modules −
In this following line of code we use requests to make a GET HTTP requests for the url:https://authoraditiagarwal.com/ by making a GET request.
Todoist time. Now we need to create a Soup object as follows − Citrix workspace 19.12 download.
Output
Web Scraping Data Extraction Tools
The corresponding output will be as shown here −
Lxml
Another Python library we are going to discuss for web scraping is lxml. It is a highperformance HTML and XML parsing library. It is comparatively fast and straightforward. You can read about it more on https://lxml.de/.
Installing lxml
Web Scraping Data Mining Extraction
Using the pip command, we can install lxml either in our virtual environment or in global installation.
Example: Data extraction using lxml and requests
In the following example, we are scraping a particular element of the web page from authoraditiagarwal.com by using lxml and requests −
First, we need to import the requests and html from lxml library as follows −
Now we need to provide the url of web page to scrap
Download bleile datentechnik driver. Now we need to provide the path (Xpath) to particular element of that web page −
Output
The corresponding output will be as shown here −