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53 posts tagged with "python"

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· 16 min read
Oleg Kulyk

How to download images with Python?

Downloading images using Python is an essential skill for various applications, including web scraping, data analysis, and machine learning. This comprehensive guide explores the top Python libraries for image downloading, advanced techniques, and best practices for ethical and efficient image scraping. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced developer, understanding the nuances of these tools and techniques can significantly enhance your projects. Popular libraries like Requests, Urllib3, Wget, PyCURL, and Aiohttp each offer unique features suited for different scenarios. For instance, Requests is known for its simplicity and user-friendly API, making it a favorite among developers for straightforward tasks. On the other hand, advanced users may prefer Urllib3 for its robust connection pooling and SSL verification capabilities. Additionally, leveraging asynchronous libraries like Aiohttp can optimize large-scale, concurrent downloads, which is crucial for high-performance scraping tasks. Beyond the basics, advanced techniques such as using Selenium for dynamic content, handling complex image sources, and implementing parallel downloads can further refine your scraping strategy. Ethical considerations, including compliance with copyright laws and website terms of service, are also paramount to ensure responsible scraping practices. This guide aims to provide a holistic view of Python image downloading, equipping you with the knowledge to handle various challenges effectively.

This article is a part of the series on image downloading with different programming languages. Check out the other articles in the series:

· 11 min read
Oleg Kulyk

Handling Scrapy Failure URLs - A Comprehensive Guide

Web scraping is an increasingly essential tool in data collection and analysis, enabling businesses and researchers to gather vast amounts of information from the web efficiently. Among the numerous frameworks available for web scraping, Scrapy stands out due to its robustness and flexibility. However, the process of web scraping is not without its challenges, especially when dealing with failures that can halt or disrupt scraping tasks. From network failures to HTTP errors and parsing issues, understanding how to handle these failures is crucial for maintaining the reliability and efficiency of your scraping projects. This guide delves into the common types of failures encountered in Scrapy and provides practical solutions to manage them effectively, ensuring that your scraping tasks remain smooth and uninterrupted. For those looking to deepen their web scraping skills, this comprehensive guide will equip you with the knowledge to handle failures adeptly, backed by detailed explanations and code examples. For more detailed information, you can visit the Scrapy documentation.

· 15 min read
Oleg Kulyk

How to Create a Proxy Server in Python Using Proxy.py

You can be one of two groups of web developers:

  1. Developers who get blocked when web scraping
  2. Developers who use proxy servers to hide their IP and easily extract the data they want

If you’re in group 2, then you make it harder for websites or services to track your online activity. You will be able to bypass regional restrictions and access content that might otherwise be unavailable. You can even filter and inspect incoming and outgoing traffic to protect against malicious requests or unauthorized access attempts.

In this article, we’ll explain how to use the proxy.py library so you will be firmly set to be in group 2. Let’s not waste any more time and get straight to it.

· 15 min read
Oleg Kulyk

How to Use Requests Library with Sessions to Crawl Websites in Python

Extracting information from websites is an invaluable skill. When utilized, it can support you by collecting vast amounts of data from the internet quickly. Automating data gathering from websites takes away the tedium and time consumed when done manually. This process, popularly known as web scraping, is made significantly more accessible with the Python Requests library.

· 16 min read
Oleg Kulyk

Python Requests Proxy | How to Use Proxy Types in Python Requests

Python requests are a helpful tool that makes sending HTTP requests easier for Python programs. It simplifies online API connections, website data retrieval, and other web tasks.

Proxy servers are a key part of web scraping, which enables mass data extraction from websites. By utilizing proxies in web scraping with Python requests, you can overcome restrictions, enhance privacy, mitigate IP blocking risks, and effectively gather the data you need for your projects or analysis.

· 13 min read
Oleg Kulyk

Breaking Down IP Restrictions: How to Overcome Website Limits and Gather Data Safely

As the internet grows, I'm finding that many website owners are using IP restrictions to protect their content from unauthorized access. Essentially, IP restrictions limit the requests a user can make to a website within a specific period. Still, they can also pose a challenge for web scrapers like me trying to gather data from the site. In this blog post, I'll explain how IP restrictions work, why they're used, and explore different ways that I can overcome these limitations as a web scraper.

· 8 min read
Oleg Kulyk

A Quick Guide to Parsing HTML with RegEx

Parsing HTML documents can be complex and tedious, but it is an integral part of web development. It is common to parse HTML pages to extract the required information when working with web scraping or website building. One of the methods applied to parse HTML pages is through the use of regular expressions (RegEx).

This guide will walk you through how to parse HTML with RegEx using Python, along with best practices and tips.

· 6 min read
Oleg Kulyk

Jupyter vs Spyder. Which One Is  Better for Python Programming?

Programming has been at the heart of the massive technological developments that we have experienced over the past few decades or so. From data analysis to web development, programming languages such as Python have significantly aided technological innovation. In fact, the position of Python among the pantheon of programming languages is unique.

Most web developers and data scientists prefer to use Python as their primary programming language over other options. And if you’re one such person working with Python or considering doing so, it’s essential to use IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to make programming more efficient and convenient.

· 10 min read
Oleg Kulyk

Scrape a Dynamic Website with Python

Internet extends fast and modern websites pretty often use dynamic content load mechanisms to provide the best user experience. Still, on the other hand, it becomes harder to extract data from such web pages, as it requires the execution of internal Javascript in the page context while scraping. Let's review several conventional techniques that allow data extraction from dynamic websites using Python.