Scraping Your First Web Page with Python
This course covers the important tools for retrieving web content using HTTP libraries such as Requests, Httplib2 and Urllib, as well as powerful technologies for web parsing. These include Beautiful Soup, which is a popular library, and Scrapy, which is a powerful, production-grade framework.
What you'll learn
Web scraping is an important technique that is widely used as the first step in many workflows in data mining, information retrieval, and text-based machine learning. In this course, Scraping your First Web Page with Python, you will gain the ability to apply different scraping techniques including Beautiful Soup, and Scrapy. First, you will learn and use various HTTP client libraries such as Requests, httplib2, and urllib to download HTML content. Next, you will discover how Beautiful Soup is an extremely popular Python library that does better than regex in important ways. You will see how Beautiful Soup fixes up badly formed HTML, and constructs a nice parse tree that can be traversed and queried. Finally, you will add to your toolkit the knowledge of Scrapy, which is a full-fledged web scraping framework that combines the steps of retrieving and parsing web content and does so at production-scale. When you’re finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge to identify the relative strengths and use-cases of different web retrieval and scraping technologies such as regular expressions, Beautiful Soup, and Scrapy.
Table of contents
- Version Check 0m
- Module Overview 1m
- Prerequisites and Course Outline 1m
- HTTP Requests and Responses 6m
- Web Scraping 2m
- HTTP Client Libraries 4m
- Making GET Requests Using httplib2 7m
- Making OPTIONS, POST, PUT Requests with httplib2 4m
- Handling Redirects with httplib2 4m
- Making HTTP Requests and Parsing URLs Using urllib 7m
- GET and POST Requests Using the Requests Library 5m
- Handling Redirects with the Requests Library 3m
- Module Summary 1m
- Module Overview 1m
- The HTML Parse Tree 4m
- Beautiful Soup for HTML Parsing 2m
- Introducing Beautiful Soup 5m
- Extracting Specific Page Elements 6m
- Filtering Elements Using Find and Find All 7m
- Searching and Filtering Using Custom Functions 3m
- Extracting Links from a Page 6m
- Using a Soup Strainer to Parse a Subset of a Document 4m
- Module Summary 1m
- Module Overview 1m
- How Scrapy Works 3m
- Creating Your First Custom Spider 7m
- Writing Scraped Contents to a File 2m
- Exploring Items Using the Scrapy Shell 4m
- Using Items to Store Extracted Content 4m
- Using Item Loaders and Input and Output Processors for Scraped Data 7m
- Using Pipelines to Transform Scraped Data 5m
- Module Summary 1m
About the author
Janani has a Masters degree from Stanford and worked for 7+ years at Google. She was one of the original engineers on Google Docs and holds 4 patents for its real-time collaborative editing framework. After spending years working in tech in the Bay Area, New York, and Singapore at companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Flipkart, Janani finally decided to combine her love for technology with her passion for teaching. She is now the co-founder of Loonycorn, a content studio focused on providin... more