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Getting Started with Beautiful Soup
Enhance your web scraping skills with Beautiful SoupAbout This BookLearn about the features of Beautiful Soup with PythonUnderstand how to use a simple method to extract information from websites using Beautiful Soup and the Python urllib2 moduleMaster searching, navigation, content modification, encoding, and output methods quickly and efficientlyTry out the example code and get to grips with Beautiful Soup easilyWho This Book Is ForGetting Started with Beautiful Soup is great for anybody who is interested in website scraping and extracting information. However, a basic knowledge of Python, HTML tags, and CSS is required for better understanding.
What You Will LearnLearn how to scrape HTML pages from websitesImplement a simple method to scrape any website with the help of developer tools, the Python urllib2 module, and Beautiful SoupLearn how to search for information within an HTML/XML pageModify the contents of an HTML treeUnderstand encoding support in Beautiful SoupLearn about the different types of output formattingIn DetailBeautiful Soup is a Python library designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need without writing excess code for an application. It doesn't take much code to write an application using Beautiful Soup.
Getting Started with Beautiful Soup is a practical guide to Beautiful Soup using Python. The book starts by walking you through the installation of each and every feature of Beautiful Soup using simple examples which include sample Python codes as well as diagrams and screenshots wherever required for better understanding. The book discusses the problems of how exactly you can get data out of a website and provides an easy solution with the help of a real website and sample code.
Getting Started with Beautiful Soup goes over the different methods to install Beautiful Soup in both Linux and Windows systems. You will then learn about searching, navigating, content modification, encoding support, and output formatting with the help of examples and sample Python codes for each example so that you can try them out to get a better understanding. This book is a practical guide for scraping information from any website. If you want to learn how to efficiently scrape pages from websites, then this book is for you.
What You Will LearnLearn how to scrape HTML pages from websitesImplement a simple method to scrape any website with the help of developer tools, the Python urllib2 module, and Beautiful SoupLearn how to search for information within an HTML/XML pageModify the contents of an HTML treeUnderstand encoding support in Beautiful SoupLearn about the different types of output formattingIn DetailBeautiful Soup is a Python library designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need without writing excess code for an application. It doesn't take much code to write an application using Beautiful Soup.
Getting Started with Beautiful Soup is a practical guide to Beautiful Soup using Python. The book starts by walking you through the installation of each and every feature of Beautiful Soup using simple examples which include sample Python codes as well as diagrams and screenshots wherever required for better understanding. The book discusses the problems of how exactly you can get data out of a website and provides an easy solution with the help of a real website and sample code.
Getting Started with Beautiful Soup goes over the different methods to install Beautiful Soup in both Linux and Windows systems. You will then learn about searching, navigating, content modification, encoding support, and output formatting with the help of examples and sample Python codes for each example so that you can try them out to get a better understanding. This book is a practical guide for scraping information from any website. If you want to learn how to efficiently scrape pages from websites, then this book is for you.
201 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2014
6 people are currently reading
8 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 25, 2015
Rich with examples and scenarios to apply all of BeautifulSoup's capabilities.
June 5, 2017
It's a good book. Either by accident or on purpose its descriptions are vague enough that one has to work through the examples and instructions properly, ending in a much better learning experience.
May 19, 2017
Good for the bare basics.
March 3, 2014
Dry, but complete and well-structured
This book is suitable for people who know already what an object is, but not yet the difference between lxml and html5lib.
It is very well structured and keeps example code minimal, but sufficient. For beginners it provides idiot-proof installation instructions and a lot of hints at mistakes one could make, even at very stupid ones. For more advanced programmers, the book proposes best practices and shows details that are not present in the online documentation.
I have only one objection. The book is very dry and reading it is a bit tiring despite its limited and relatively simple subject. If the examples were funny or in another way entertaining, the book would be easier to read. Also, showing things in a more general perspective a few times would make reading easier and more satisfying. Even a simple explanation of the name "Beautiful Soup" would give an impression of the problem the package attacks.
Before reading the book I had no experience with Beautiful Soup and was wondering how I could use it to deactivate links in foreign content I was including in my website. After spending 15 Minutes with reading the proper chapter in "Getting started with Beautiful Soup", I had at least five possible solutions at hand. And it was obvious which one is best.
This book is suitable for people who know already what an object is, but not yet the difference between lxml and html5lib.
It is very well structured and keeps example code minimal, but sufficient. For beginners it provides idiot-proof installation instructions and a lot of hints at mistakes one could make, even at very stupid ones. For more advanced programmers, the book proposes best practices and shows details that are not present in the online documentation.
I have only one objection. The book is very dry and reading it is a bit tiring despite its limited and relatively simple subject. If the examples were funny or in another way entertaining, the book would be easier to read. Also, showing things in a more general perspective a few times would make reading easier and more satisfying. Even a simple explanation of the name "Beautiful Soup" would give an impression of the problem the package attacks.
Before reading the book I had no experience with Beautiful Soup and was wondering how I could use it to deactivate links in foreign content I was including in my website. After spending 15 Minutes with reading the proper chapter in "Getting started with Beautiful Soup", I had at least five possible solutions at hand. And it was obvious which one is best.
March 14, 2014
Sometimes you need to find out ways to get data from third party sites that do not provide any api and I have been a fan of python for providing a beautiful library called beautiful soup.
Getting Started with Beautiful Soup is a well structured book covering the topic and makes learning fun and interesting. Really simplistic approach and recommended if you want to get up and running with beautiful soup investing less time. Good book, recommended for beginners.
Getting Started with Beautiful Soup is a well structured book covering the topic and makes learning fun and interesting. Really simplistic approach and recommended if you want to get up and running with beautiful soup investing less time. Good book, recommended for beginners.
November 26, 2014
It's a nice book to get an introduction in the steps of web scraping. Unfortunately, packtpub.com has changed and this site is used in all the examples. This makes it hard for beginners to follow what is happening in the code.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews