lxml and Requests¶

Yarn mac os. 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. Multibeast mavericks.

Web Scraping Python Modules For Beginners

Web Scraping with Pandas and Beautifulsoup. APIs are not always available. Sometimes you have to scrape data from a webpage yourself. Luckily the modules Pandas and Beautifulsoup can help! Related Course: Complete Python Programming Course & Exercises. Pandas has a neat concept known as a DataFrame. Python Modules for Web Scraping Web scraping is the process of constructing an agent which can extract, parse, download and organize useful information from the web automatically. An open source and collaborative framework for extracting the data you need from websites. In a fast, simple, yet extensible way. Maintained by Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) and many other contributors. # djangowebscrapingexample $ pipenv shell $ django-admin startproject djangowebscrapingexample. $ python manage.py createsuperuser $ python manage.py makemigrations $ python manage.py migrate Unpacking some of the commands above, we’ll be creating a virtual environment shell instance to execute Django commands. Here web scraping comes into the picture! It is a technique to extract the data using HTML tags. Here I will discuss this technique to scrape the weather data from the EstesPark Weather website. This website was primarily created as a public service for residents of Estes Park, Colorado, and Vicinity. Below is the screenshot of the website.

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:

Python Crawler Library

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

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.

Python Web Scraping Packages

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’.

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’:

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

Let’s see what we got exactly:

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.

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.