Practical Web Scraping for Data Science: Best Practices and Examples with Python

© Seppe vanden Broucke and Bart Baesens 2018

Seppe vanden Broucke and Bart BaesensPractical Web Scraping for Data Sciencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3582-9_2

2. The Web Speaks HTTP

Seppe vanden Broucke¹  and Bart Baesens²

(1)

KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

(2)

Dept of Decision Sci & Info Managem, KU Leuven Dept of Decision Sci & Info Managem, Leuven, Belgium

 

In this chapter, we introduce one of the core building blocks that makes up the web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), after having provided a brief introduction to computer networks in general. We then introduce the Python requests library, which we’ll use to perform HTTP requests and effectively start retrieving websites with Python. The chapter closes with a section on using parameters ...