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.
Author Name: Janani Ravi
Author Description:
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 providing … more

Table of Contents

• Course Overview
  1min
• Getting Started with Web Scraping
  46mins
• Working with the Parse Tree in BeautifulSoup
  39mins
• Selecting Elements Using the Scrapy Shell
  36mins
• Scraping Web Sites Using Scrapy Spiders
  35mins