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You're reading from  Web Scraping with Python

Product typeBook
Published inOct 2015
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781782164364
Edition1st Edition
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Richard Penman
Richard Penman
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Richard Penman

Richard Lawson is from Australia and studied Computer Science at the University of Melbourne. Since graduating, he built a business specializing in web scraping while travelling the world, working remotely from over 50 countries. He is a fluent Esperanto speaker, conversational in Mandarin and Korean, and active in contributing to and translating open source software. He is currently undertaking postgraduate studies at Oxford University and in his spare time enjoys developing autonomous drones.
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Automated scraping with Scrapely


For scraping the annotated fields Portia uses a library called Scrapely, which is a useful open-source tool developed independently of Portia and is available at https://github.com/scrapy/scrapely. Scrapely uses training data to build a model of what to scrape from a web page, and then this model can be applied to scrape other web pages with the same structure in future. Here is an example to show how it works:

(portia_example)$ python
>>> from scrapely import Scraper
>>> s = Scraper()
>>> train_url = 'http://example.webscraping.com/view/Afghanistan-1'
>>> s.train(train_url, {'name': 'Afghanistan', 'population': '29,121,286'})
>>> test_url = 'http://example.webscraping.com/view/United-Kingdom-239'
>>> s.scrape(test_url)
[{u'name': [u'United Kingdom'], u'population': [u'62,348,447']}]

First, Scrapely is given the data we want to scrape from the Afghanistan web page to train the model, being the country...

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Web Scraping with Python
Published in: Oct 2015Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781782164364

Author (1)

author image
Richard Penman

Richard Lawson is from Australia and studied Computer Science at the University of Melbourne. Since graduating, he built a business specializing in web scraping while travelling the world, working remotely from over 50 countries. He is a fluent Esperanto speaker, conversational in Mandarin and Korean, and active in contributing to and translating open source software. He is currently undertaking postgraduate studies at Oxford University and in his spare time enjoys developing autonomous drones.
Read more about Richard Penman