February 2024
Intermediate to advanced
352 pages
8h 52m
English
Content preview from Web Scraping with Python, 3rd Edition
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 17. Avoiding Scraping Traps
Few things are more frustrating than scraping a site, viewing the output, and not seeing the data that’s so clearly visible in your browser. Or submitting a form that should be perfectly fine but gets denied by the web server. Or getting your IP address blocked by a site for unknown reasons.
These are some of the most difficult bugs to solve, not only because they can be so unexpected (a script that works just fine on one site might not work at all on another, seemingly identical, site), but because they purposefully don’t have any telltale error messages or stack traces to use. You’ve been identified as a bot, rejected, and you don’t know why.
In this book, I’ve written about a lot of ways to do tricky things on websites, including submitting forms, extracting and cleaning difficult data, and executing JavaScript. This chapter is a bit of a catchall in that the techniques stem from a wide variety of subjects. However, they all have something in common: they are meant to overcome an obstacle put in place for the sole purpose of preventing automated scraping of a site.
Regardless of how immediately useful this information is to you at the moment, I highly recommend you at least skim this chapter. You never know when it might help you solve a difficult bug or prevent a problem altogether.
A Note on Ethics
In the first few chapters of this book, I discussed the legal gray area that web scraping inhabits, as well as some of the ethical and legal ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.