October 2015
Beginner to intermediate
174 pages
3h 32m
English
Content preview from Python Web ScrapingBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Three approaches to scrape a web page
Now that we understand the structure of this web page we will investigate three different approaches to scraping its data, firstly with regular expressions, then with the popular BeautifulSoup module, and finally with the powerful lxml module.
Regular expressions
If you are unfamiliar with regular expressions or need a reminder, there is a thorough overview available at https://docs.python.org/2/howto/regex.html.
To scrape the area using regular expressions, we will first try matching the contents of the <td> element, as follows:
>>> import re >>> url = 'http://example.webscraping.com/view/UnitedKingdom-239' >>> html = download(url) >>> re.findall('<td class="w2p_fw">(.*?)</td>', html) ['<img src="/places/static/images/flags/gb.png" ...Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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