Website Scraping with Python : Using BeautifulSoup and Scrapy

Closely examine website scraping and data processing: the technique of extracting data from websites in a format suitable for further analysis. Youll review which tools to use, and compare their features and efficiency. Focusing on BeautifulSoup4 and Scrapy, this concise, focused book highlights common problems and suggests solutions that readers can implement on their own.
Website Scraping with Python starts by introducing and installing the scraping tools and explaining the features of the full application that readers will build throughout the book. Youll see how to use BeautifulSoup4 and Scrapy individually or together to achieve the desired results. Because many sites use JavaScript, youll also employ Selenium with a browser emulator to render these sites and make them ready for scraping.
By the end of this book, youll have a complete scraping application to use and rewrite to suit your needs. As a bonus, the authorshows you options of how to deploy your spiders into the Cloud to leverage your computer from long-running scraping tasks.

What Youll Learn

• Install and implement scraping tools individually and together
  
• Run spiders to crawl websites for data from the cloud
  
• Work with emulators and drivers to extract data from scripted sites
  

Who This Book Is For
Readers with some previous Python and software development experience, and an interest in website scraping.