Using Python to Access Web Data

University of Michigan via Coursera

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Overview

Using Python to Access Web Data is an essential course for learners who want to understand how to collect, process, and analyze data from the web using Python. Designed for beginners to intermediate programmers, this course explores the foundational skills needed to automate data gathering and unlock insights from online content. The course starts with an introduction to key Python libraries such as urllib, BeautifulSoup, and requests, teaching learners how to fetch data from websites and parse HTML content. It progresses...

Syllabus

Getting Started

In this section you will install Python and a text editor. In previous classes in the specialization this was an optional assignment, but in this class it is the first requirement to get started. From this point forward we will stop using the browser-based Python grading environment because the browser-based Python environment (Skulpt) is not capable of running the more complex programs we will be developing in this class.

Regular Expressions (Chapter 11)

Regular expressions are a very specialized language that allow us to succinctly search strings and extract data from strings. Regular expressions are a language unto themselves. It is not essential to know how to use regular expressions, but they can be quite useful and powerful.

Networks and Sockets (Chapter 12)

In this section we learn about the protocols that web browsers use to retrieve documents and web applications use to interact with Application Program Interfaces (APIs).