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You're reading from  Hands-On Web Scraping with Python - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inOct 2023
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781837636211
Edition2nd Edition
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Author (1)
Anish Chapagain
Anish Chapagain
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Anish Chapagain

Anish Chapagain is a software engineer with a passion for data science, its processes, and Python programming, which began around 2007. He has been working with web scraping and analysis-related tasks for more than 5 years, and is currently pursuing freelance projects in the web scraping domain. Anish previously worked as a trainer, web/software developer, and as a banker, where he was exposed to data and gained further insights into topics including data analysis, visualization, data mining, information processing, and knowledge discovery. He has an MSc in computer systems from Bangor University (University of Wales), United Kingdom, and an Executive MBA from Himalayan Whitehouse International College, Kathmandu, Nepal.
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Web scraping using APIs

Technically, obtaining data from APIs is easy, and is also different from the web scraping scenarios. Most of the data is in JSON format, and there is no use of XPath, CSS Selector, or any other parsing libraries. Some data found using APIs might contain a lot of HTML code. To deal with this content, XPath and CSS Selector might be required.

Important note

In the examples in this section, we have tried to omit APIs that require an API key (walmartlabs.com, nasa.gov, nytimes.com, maps.googleapis.com) or user authentication tools. An API key is an authenticated value provided by service providers (after user registration) that identifies the user using the API. Freely available APIs are being used in these examples.

With the help of a few examples, we will collect data returned via some APIs. This collected data will then be exported as JSON and CSV files.

Example 1 – holidays from the US calendar

https://date.nager.at/ contains information...

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Hands-On Web Scraping with Python - Second Edition
Published in: Oct 2023Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781837636211

Author (1)

author image
Anish Chapagain

Anish Chapagain is a software engineer with a passion for data science, its processes, and Python programming, which began around 2007. He has been working with web scraping and analysis-related tasks for more than 5 years, and is currently pursuing freelance projects in the web scraping domain. Anish previously worked as a trainer, web/software developer, and as a banker, where he was exposed to data and gained further insights into topics including data analysis, visualization, data mining, information processing, and knowledge discovery. He has an MSc in computer systems from Bangor University (University of Wales), United Kingdom, and an Executive MBA from Himalayan Whitehouse International College, Kathmandu, Nepal.
Read more about Anish Chapagain