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.
Offered By
About this Course
Learner Career Outcomes
29%
30%
15%
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
Learner Career Outcomes
29%
30%
15%
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
TOP REVIEWS FROM USING PYTHON TO ACCESS WEB DATA
interesting course. well structured and paced with practical real-life examples and clear study materials. i strongly recommend this course for anyone considering learning python. Thank you Dr. Chuck!
This course was really interesting and did a good job introducing complicated topics in usefully simplified form. It was a pleasure to listen to the instructor and I got everything I wanted out of it.
Highly recommended to anyone wants to learn the python to access web data, you will definitely learn the content smoothly with the awesome instructor, yeah, great instructor, i love his teaching style
Getting a bit more challenging than the earlier courses in the specialization. The exercises require more struggle, but all the information is there. Another step along the way. Thank you, Dr. Chuck!
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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