This course will show how one can treat the Internet as a source of data. We will scrape, parse, and read web data as well as access data using web APIs. We will work with HTML, XML, and JSON data formats in Python. This course will cover Chapters 11-13 of the textbook “Python for Everybody”. To succeed in this course, you should be familiar with the material covered in Chapters 1-10 of the textbook and the first two courses in this specialization. These topics include variables and expressions, conditional execution (loops, branching, and try/except), functions, Python data structures (strings, lists, dictionaries, and tuples), and manipulating files. This course covers Python 3.
This course is part of the Python for Everybody Specialization
Offered By
About this Course
What you will 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 will gain
- Json
- Xml
- Python Programming
- Web Scraping
Offered by

University of Michigan
The mission of the University of Michigan is to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.
Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
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).
Programs that Surf the Web (Chapter 12)
In this section we learn to use Python to retrieve data from web sites and APIs over the Internet.
Reviews
- 5 stars80.87%
- 4 stars15.70%
- 3 stars2.62%
- 2 stars0.46%
- 1 star0.34%
HIGHLIGHTS
TOP REVIEWS FROM USING PYTHON TO ACCESS WEB DATA
Excellent course, Dr Chuck is amazing in delivering the content of this course in a very unique manner, a great deal of practice and examples and sample code to help students throughout the course
This course is great to introduce you to regular expression, HTML, XML and JSON. Based on this course, you may dive into many other materials to further learning how to use python to access web data.
It is a very good course even for an absolute beginner. Gives knowledge of what APIs, web scraping, different web protocols. Dr. Severence is engaging and very good at explaining hard things easily.
Great course. The lectures are clear and thorough. The assignments are challenging yet doable. The only thing I would like is to see more assignments to get more practice with the techniques learned.
About the Python for Everybody Specialization
This Specialization builds on the success of the Python for Everybody course and will introduce fundamental programming concepts including data structures, networked application program interfaces, and databases, using the Python programming language. In the Capstone Project, you’ll use the technologies learned throughout the Specialization to design and create your own applications for data retrieval, processing, and visualization.

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