Web Scraping Python



Web sites don’t always provide their data in comfortable formats such as CSV or JSON. This is where web scraping comes in. Web scraping is the practice of using a computer program to sift through a web page and gather the data that you need in a format most useful to you while at the same time preserving the structure of the data.

  • The webbyte is a byte object returned by the server and the content type present in webpage is mostly utf-8. Therefore you need to decode webbyte using decode method. This solves complete problem while I was having trying to scrap from a website using PyCharm. P.S - I use python 3.4.
  • Scrapy is a powerful Python web scraping and web crawling framework. Scrapy provides many features to download web pages asynchronously, process them and save them. It handles multithreading, crawling (the process of going from link to link to find every URL in a website), sitemap crawling, and more.
  • Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Web Scraping With Beautiful Soup and Python The incredible amount of data on the Internet is a rich resource for any field of research or personal interest. To effectively harvest that data, you’ll need to.
  • Python has good options to scrape the web. The best one with a framework is scrapy. It can be a little tricky for beginners, so here is a little help. Install python above 3.5 (lower ones till 2.7 will work). Create a environment in conda ( I did this). Install scrapy at a location and run in from there.

lxml and Requests¶

Python

lxml is a pretty extensive library written for parsingXML and HTML documents very quickly, even handling messed up tags in theprocess. We will also be using theRequests module instead of thealready built-in urllib2 module due to improvements in speed and readability.You can easily install both using pipinstalllxml andpipinstallrequests.

Let’s start with the imports:

Next we will use requests.get to retrieve the web page with our data,parse it using the html module, and save the results in tree: Install latest xcode.

(We need to use page.content rather than page.text becausehtml.fromstring implicitly expects bytes as input.)

Web Scraping Python 3

tree now contains the whole HTML file in a nice tree structure whichwe can go over two different ways: XPath and CSSSelect. In this example, wewill focus on the former.

XPath is a way of locating information in structured documents such asHTML or XML documents. A good introduction to XPath is onW3Schools .

There are also various tools for obtaining the XPath of elements such asFireBug for Firefox or the Chrome Inspector. If you’re using Chrome, youcan right click an element, choose ‘Inspect element’, highlight the code,right click again, and choose ‘Copy XPath’.

Python Web Scraping Sample

After a quick analysis, we see that in our page the data is contained intwo elements – one is a div with title ‘buyer-name’ and the other is aspan with class ‘item-price’: Mac mini upgrade ram 2020.

Knowing this we can create the correct XPath query and use the lxmlxpath function like this:

Web Scraping Python Beautifulsoup

Let’s see what we got exactly:

Python Scrape Data From Website

Congratulations! We have successfully scraped all the data we wanted froma web page using lxml and Requests. We have it stored in memory as twolists. Now we can do all sorts of cool stuff with it: we can analyze itusing Python or we can save it to a file and share it with the world.

Web Scraping Python Libraries

Mac os office download. Some more cool ideas to think about are modifying this script to iteratethrough the rest of the pages of this example dataset, or rewriting thisapplication to use threads for improved speed.