Using Python to Access Web Data

Instructor: Charles Russell Severance

Beginner Level • 7 hours to complete • Flexible Schedule

What You'll Learn

  • Use regular expressions to extract data from strings
  • Understand the protocols web browsers use to retrieve documents and web apps
  • Retrieve data from websites and APIs using Python
  • Work with XML (eXtensible Markup Language) data

Skills You'll Gain

Extensible Markup Language (XML)
JSON
Data Capture
Application Programming Interface (API)
Network Protocols
Scripting
Data Import/Export
TCP/IP
Restful API
Web Scraping
Python Programming
Text Mining
Web Services
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
Data Access

Shareable Certificate

Earn a shareable certificate to add to your LinkedIn profile

Outcomes

  • Learn new concepts from industry experts
  • Gain a foundational understanding of a subject or tool
  • Develop job-relevant skills with hands-on projects
  • Earn a shareable career certificate

There are 6 modules in this course

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 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.

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).

In this section we learn to use Python to retrieve data from web sites and APIs over the Internet.

In this section, we learn how to retrieve and parse XML (eXtensible Markup Language) data.

In this module, we work with Application Program Interfaces / Web Services using the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data format.