Is Beautiful Soup the best for web scraping?
What is the best way to scrape the data from websites in Python?
I have used BeautifulSoup in the past, but haven't used it for a while. Now I'm wondering if there is another option that I should be considering.
I am scraping some data from an e-commerce site, so the data is in a table format and the information needs to be scraped by tag, not by name. Right now I am using beautifulsoup with urllib.request and bs4.
Import requests. Import json. From bs4 import BeautifulSoup. Url = '. R = requests.get(url) html = r.text soup = BeautifulSoup(html). Tagdata = soup.findall("td") for tag in tagdata: value = tag.gettext() key = tag.gettext() valuejson = json. In case you are planning to create your own custom scraper, then you are likely to do better with lxml than with BeautifulSoup. Here's an example using the simplest possible scraper, which will read a webpage and return a single row of data from it: from lxml import html. R = requests.get(url) doc = html.gettext(strip=True) for cell in row.
Is Scrapy faster than Selenium?
I'm in the process of building a web scraper to get a list of news articles from a website.
I'm using Selenium as my main driver for the web browser, but I also use the Python web scraping library Scrapy. In a test, I scraped a website with 20K pages. Selenium took 8 minutes and 15 seconds to scrape the site while Scrapy took just 2 minutes and 12 seconds. The difference between the two is huge!
Can anyone tell me why this is? Should I scrapy or selenium for this task? Because it is not about the technology you are using. The issue is that the site has a lot of javascript and it does not work the same way on all browsers. For example you can't simply send a POST request to the page and expect the server to send a response. If it did you would get an error.
Selenium is good at detecting these cases and will only allow the execution of javascript to happen if it is actually in the page, so it would not be able to scrape it. Scrapy is good at scraping dynamic content. It would be able to detect the presence of javascript and continue scraping.
It really depends on the site you are scraping, I have used Selenium for a couple of sites and it was very difficult to get to the content in some cases. Scrapy on the other hand scrapes almost all content and does not require much of an extra work to parse content that is not visible on the page. The speed of Scrapy however does vary depending on what you have configured on it.
I would go for Scrapy because it is more flexible, easy to configure and has great support for css selectors. I found this article by a professional who worked with scrapy before.
Is requests faster than Selenium?
I'm pretty new to programming, so it's entirely possible I'm using the tool incorrectly.
I'm using Chrome as my web browser. I've installed FireFoxDriver and Selenium to connect to chrome. It's installed correctly according to selenium-desktop.
As I type my script, I can watch firefox start in the background to connect, which is how I got that the script works. I want the script to type a few words then quit. However, the script is still running so the next time I go to type, the browser hasn't closed. Is there some sort of "sleep" in the script that would make it go faster? The scripts runs several instances of the script, and does several things I need the user to do. I also noticed Firefox would be open for about an hour after it was installed and ran from my script.
#import system modules. Import wx. Import os. Import time. From selenium import webdriver. From selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
#import functions. Def getpage(url): url = '/drupal-loggedin/signup.php'.format(url)
browser = webdriver.Chrome('/Users//Scripts/chromedriver') browser.get(url) pageSource = browser.pagesource print(pageSource). #type and quit. Def typeandquit(): inputtext = wx.TextCtrl(name = 'input-text', value = 'Please enter name') inputtext.SetFocus() inputtext.Destroy() browser.quit() #run script. Typeandquit(). If name == "main": mainmenu(). I think the problem is the script is stuck in its loop. You should look at Selenium documentation. Try to change your code like this
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