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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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Facebook


Currently, Facebook is the world's largest social network in terms of monthly active users, and therefore, its user data is extremely valuable.

The website

Here is an example Facebook page for Packt Publishing at https://www.facebook.com/PacktPub:

Viewing the source of this page, you would find that the first few posts are available, and that later posts are loaded with AJAX when the browser scrolls. Facebook also has a mobile interface, which, as mentioned in Chapter 1, Introduction to Web Scraping, is often easier to scrape. The same page using the mobile interface is available at https://m.facebook.com/PacktPub:

If we interacted with the mobile website and then checked Firebug we would find that this interface uses a similar structure for the AJAX events, so it is not actually easier to scrape. These AJAX events can be reverse engineered; however, different types of Facebook pages use different AJAX calls, and from my past experience, Facebook often changes the structure of these...

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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