How do I use Selenium for web scraping in Python?

Can I use Selenium and BeautifulSoup together?

in Python? Absolutely, and you wouldn't want to use the wrong one. BeautifulSoup is a parse-only library, designed to extract information from HTML. In addition to that, it is capable of manipulating that information in some simple ways like filling out forms. When used with Selenium, this combination is perfect because it allows you to parse HTML and give only information that you need to use in your tests.

In your question, you mention you are interested in scraping data "then after parsing to pull the final values." BeautifulSoup is perfect for that because it doesn't "destruct" the HTML, unlike things like Scrapy and Requests.

If you still want to use Selenium though, there is no reason why you can't. The main thing to remember is you have to make sure to call.get() or.click() on things and that an appropriate number of arguments is passed to whatever function you are calling.

Selenium comes with a tutorial that shows you how to do this in HTML, but it's very similar to how you would do it in Python. Here is an example of how the tutorial code would be rewritten in Python.

Import time. From selenium import webdriver. Driver = webdriver.Firefox() driver.get(') # Click the "Contact" button whose class attribute is "btn btn-black". Driver.findelementbyclassname("btn btn-black").click()
# Wait until the contact link appears on the page. Time.sleep(5) # Get the value of the "name" attribute of the HTML element. Name = driver.findelementbytagname("h1", "p", "text").getattribute("innerHTML")
Here is an example using BeautifulSoup. From bs4 import BeautifulSoup. Driver = webdriver.Chrome() driver.get(') # Find the img tag with the class "myphoto". Photo = driver.

How do I use Selenium for web scraping in Python?

I believe this is a perfect example to use Selenium for web scraping. Also check Bulma, which simplifies web scrapes even further in Javascript: from selenium import webdriver. From bs4 import BeautifulSoup. Import requests. Import time. Url = "". Browser = webdriver.Firefox() browser.get(url) time.sleep(8) browser.getlocation('Mercury') soup = BeautifulSoup(browser.pagesource, 'lxml') soup.body.find('div', attrs = ).copy()
This works similarly to paging every 8-9 seconds, in which you extract the content of the website and update your dataframe. Then you can enclose your HTML data into pandas.DataFrame, like this:
Df=pd.DataFrame(jmpy.jsonskeleton(response.json()))

Like instructied in this guide, it is very important to html-cleanup the loaded JSon object. However, if interested in doing so further, refer to simplyjson, since it's pyhtonic.

Is Selenium or BeautifulSoup better for web scraping?

Here is a more general comparison of the best HTML parser: I first scraped reddit using BeautifulSoup. The results were good and I did not have any troubles.

I then tried to use my client side scripting to scrape reddit again and I realized that they have changed a lot their code since the last time I monitored them. So again I started with BeautifulSoup. But I needed to customize it, to make it write to files in my database. It took me a lot of time to write this script and it was not fast enough (it takes a few minutes to get the whole data) so I needed to wait after 1h to see the entire list of comments. I got a lot of good results and it was much faster than BeautifulSoup.

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