Python, NoSQL and FastAPI Tutorial: Web Scraping on a Schedule

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Can there be other use cases for Cassandra beyond messaging and chat? In this tutorial, we show you how to web scrape on a schedule by integrating the Python framework called FastAPI with Astra DB, a serverless, managed Database-as-a-Service built on Cassandra.

Recently, I caught up with the Pythonic YouTuber Justin Mitchell from CodingEntrepreneurs and we discussed how today’s apps are tackling global markets and issues. He pointed out that Discord stores 120 million messages with only four backend engineers—and that was back in 2017.

The Ultimate Guide to Legal and Ethical Web Scraping in 2022

The popularity of web scraping is growing at such an accelerated pace these days. Nowadays, not everyone has technical knowledge of web scraping and they use APIs like news API to fetch news, blog APIs to fetch blog-related data, etc.

As web scraping is growing, it would be almost impossible not to get cross answers when the big question arises: is it legal?

Top 13 Web Scraping Tools in 2022

Web scraping tools are software developed specifically to simplify the process of extracting data from websites. Data mining is a rather useful and commonly used process, but it can also easily turn into a complicated and messy activity and take a lot of time and effort.

What Does a Web Scraper Do?

A web scraper uses robots to extract structured data and content from a website by extracting the underlying HTML code and data stored in a database.

Java Web Crawler: Web Browser-Based Approach

There is a lot of data on the Internet now. Often, it needs to be extracted and analyzed for various marketing research and business decision-making purposes. When needed, it should be done quickly and efficiently.

Why does one need to collect and analyze data? It may be necessary for a variety of reasons:

Is Web Scraping Legal?

Ranging from unethical hacking, identity theft, internet scams, social engineering to many more, we hear and see regulations outrightly trying to clamp down all forms of crime and swindling on the internet. However, the stance of the internet law on the legality of web scraping remains controversial.

Since you might also find yourself scraping data from the web, either now or in the future, whether for business purposes or personal use, let us address the question: is web scraping legal? You’ll soon find out.

A Guide to Web Scraping in Python using BeautifulSoup

Today we’ll discuss how to use the BeautifulSoup library to extract content from an HTML page. After extraction, we’ll convert it to a Python list or dictionary using BeautifulSoup!

What Is Web Scraping, and Why Do I Need It?

The simple answer is this: not every website has an API to fetch content. You might want to get recipes from your favorite cooking website or photos from a travel blog. Without an API, extracting the HTML, or scraping, might be the only way to get that content. I’m going to show you how to do this in Python.

Beginners Guide for Web Scraping Using Selenium

Data experts and researchers often require exact and retrieving data from unconventional sites to train or test algorithms, build datasets, machine learning models, neural networks, etc. However, the website contributes APIs that are an awe-inspiring way to retrieve structured data. But what if there is the absence of an API when you want to bypass the method.

Under such situations, the data can easily be managed through the web page. But the conventional method is highly time-consuming and cumbersome; it becomes more challenging when you have to bargain with websites such as lodge booking, real estate, work listing, etc., as they need to be accessed frequently. However, Selenium allows a computerized method through various models to fetch the information from the website and obtain whatever you want. But before going deep with the process, let's understand web scraping as well as Selenium in detail.

Develop a Scraper With Node.js, Socket.IO, and Vue.js/Nuxt.js

The incredible amount of data available publicly on the internet for any industry can be useful for market research. You can use this data in machine learning/big data to train your model with tens of thousands of entries.

Here, in this article, I’m going to discuss the development of a web scraper with Node.js, Cheerio.js, and send back-end data to Vue.js in the front-end. Along with that, I’m going to use a simple crawler Node.js package.

How to Deal With the Most Common Challenges in Web Scraping

Introduction

In the world of business, big data is key to competitors, customer preferences, and market trends. Therefore, web scraping is getting more and more popular. By using web scraping solutions, businesses get competitive advantages in the market. The reasons are many, but the most obvious are customer behavior research, price and product optimization, lead generation, and competitor monitoring. For those who practice data extraction as an essential business tactic, we’ve revealed the most common web scraping challenges.

Modifications and Changes in Website Structure

From time to time, some websites are subject to structural changes or modifications to provide a better user experience. This may be a real challenge for scrapers, who may have been initially set up for certain designs. Hence, some changes will not allow them to work properly. Even in the case of a minor change, web scrapers need to be set up along with the web page changes. Such issues are resolved by constant monitoring and timely adjustments and set-ups.

How to Scrape E-Commerce Data With Node.js and Puppeteer

Web scraping is nothing new. However, the technologies that are used to build websites are constantly developing. Hence, the techniques that have to be used to scrape a website have to adapt.

Why Node.js?

A lot of websites use front-end frameworks like React, Vue.js, Angular, etc., which load the content (or parts of the content) after the initial DOM is loaded. This especially applies to performance-optimized e-commerce websites, where price and production information are loaded asynchronously.

5 Ways to Request and Parse Web Data

1. HttpURLConnection – Send and Receive Data

HttpURLConnection has been part of Java JDK since version 1.1. It provides methods to send GET/POST requests and receive responses over HTTP protocol. They work with methods in BufferReader and InputStreamReader to read the data.  You don’t need any external libraries.  

This is the code snippet for the HTTP GET request.

Web Scraping: Leave It All to AI or Add a Human Touch?

To say there's a lot of data on the Internet is an understatement. As of 2020, it's projected that the "digital universe" holds an estimated 40 trillion gigabytes or 40 zettabytes worth of information. To put this into perspective, a single zettabyte has enough data to fill data centers roughly one-fifth the size of Manhattan.

With such a vast amount of information available to analyze, it makes sense that so many tasks associated with gathering data get left to artificial intelligence. Bots can crawl through web pages at incredible speed, extracting as much relevant information as needed. And while many data scientists and marketers access and use this info in a perfectly ethical fashion, it’s an unfortunate fact that the growing presence of AI online brings with it a growing amount of stigma.

Using Coronavirus Quarantines to Boost Your Skills

The outbreak of coronavirus globally has had a major impact on the global economy. Many countries have gone into lockdown, and there is no industry left that hasn't felt the impact. Even the programming world is facing some major setbacks because of it. However, if we talk about individual programmers, they might also be facing social or physical problems after being in quarantine or working from home for 2 or 3 weeks. But we can turn this time in our favor by learning some new skills online. All you need is a computer and a good internet connection.

Though the programming world may not be facing too many problems, the overall IT industry is. If we look at the stats of developer hiring in the USA, in February, the hiring of developers fell by nearly 70,000, which was up 52,000 in January. This decrease in developer hiring has had a huge impact on demands on developers and affects organizational strength as well.