Web Scraping using Beautiful Soup and Selenium for dynamic …
Web scraping can be defined as:“the construction of an agent to download, parse, and organize data from the web in an automated manner. ”Or in other words: instead of a human end-user clicking away in their web browser and copy-pasting interesting parts into, say, a spreadsheet, web scraping offloads this task to a computer program which can execute it much faster, and more correctly, than a human scraping is very much essential in data science has the most elaborate and supportive ecosystem when it comes to web scraping. While many languages have libraries to help with web scraping, Python’s libraries have the most advanced tools and python libraries for web scraping:Beautiful SoupScrapyRequestsLXMLSeleniumIn this guide, we will be using Beautiful Soup and Selenium to scrap one of the review pages of Trip scraping with Python often requires no more than the use of the Beautiful Soup to reach the goal. Beautiful Soup is a very powerful library that makes web scraping by traversing the DOM (document object model) easier to implement. But it does only static scraping. Static scraping ignores JavaScript. It fetches web pages from the server without the help of a browser. You get exactly what you see in “view page source”, and then you slice and dice it. If the data you are looking for is available in “view page source” only, you don’t need to go any further. But if you need data that are present in components which get rendered on clicking JavaScript links, dynamic scraping comes to the rescue. The combination of Beautiful Soup and Selenium will do the job of dynamic scraping. Selenium automates web browser interaction from python. Hence the data rendered by JavaScript links can be made available by automating the button clicks with Selenium and then can be extracted by Beautiful stallationpip install bs4 seleniumFirst, we will use Selenium to automate the button clicks required for rendering hidden but useful data. In review page of Trip Advisor, the longer reviews are partially available in the final DOM. They become fully available only on clicking “More” button. So, we will automate the clicking of all “More” buttons with Selenium to work, it must access the browser, Selenium accesses the Chrome browser driver in incognito mode and without actually opening a browser window(headless argument) Trip Advisor review page and click relevant buttonsHere, Selenium web driver traverses through the DOM of Trip Advisor review page and finds all “More” buttons. Then it iterates through all “More” buttons and automates their clicking. On the automated clicking of “More” buttons, the reviews which were partially available before becomes fully this, Selenium hands off the manipulated page source to Beautiful page source received from Selenium now contains full, Beautiful Soup loads the page source. It extracts the reviews texts by iterating through all review divs. The logic in the above code is for the review page of Trip Advisor. It can vary according to the HTML structure of the page. For future use, you can write the extracted reviews to a file. I scraped one page of Trip Advisor reviews, extracted the reviews and wrote them to a llowing are the reviews I have extracted from one of the Trip Advisor of an airline. You act like you have such low fares, then turn around and charge people for EVERYTHING you could possibly think of. $65 for carry on, a joke. No seating assignments without an upcharge for newlyweds, a joke. Charge a veteran for a carry on, a f***ing joke. Personally, I will never fly spirit again, and I’ll gladly tell everyone I know the kind of company this airline is. No room, no amenities, nothing. A bunch of penny pinchers, who could give two sh**s about the customers. Take my flight miles and shove them, I won’t be using them with this pathetic a** airline first travel experience with NK. Checked in on the mobile app and printed the boarding pass at the airport kiosk. My fare was $30. 29 for a confirmed ticket. I declined all the extras as I would when renting a car. No, no, no and no. My small backpack passed the free item test as a personal item. I was a bit thirsty so I purchased a cold bottle of water in flight for $3. 00 but I brought my own snacks. The plane pushed off the gate in Las Vegas on time and arrived in Dallas early. Overall an excellent flight. Original flight was at 3:53pm and now the most recent time in 9:28pm. Have waisted an entire day on the airport. Worst airline. I have had the same thing happen in the past were it feels like the are trying to combine two flights to make more money. If I would have know it would have taken this long I would have booked a different airline without a a bad weather flight great. Bumpy weather but they got the beverage and snack service done in styleFlew Spirit January 23rd and January 26th (flights 1672 from MCO to CMH and 1673 CMH to MCO). IF you plan accordingly you will have a good flight. We made sure our bag was correct, and checked in online. I do think the fees are ridiculous and aren’t needed. $10 to check in at the terminal? Really.. That’s dumb in my opinion. Frontier does not do that, and they are a no frill airline (pay for extras). I will say the crew members were very nice, and there was decent leg room. We had the Airbus A320. Not sure if I’d fly again because I prefer Frontier Airlines, but Spirit wasn’t bad for a quick flight. If you get the right price on it, I would recommend it… just prepare accordingly, and get your bags early. Print your boarding pass at home! worst flight i have ever been on. the rear cabin flight attendents were the worst i have sever seen. rude, no help. the seats are the most cramped i have every seen. i looked up the seat pitch is the smallest in the airline industry. 28″ delta and most other arilines are 32″ plus. maybe ok for a short hop but not for a 3 or 4 hour flight no free water or anything. a manwas trying to get settle in with his kids and asked the male flight attendent for some help with luggage in the overhead andthe male flight attendent just said put your bags in the bin and offered no assitance. my son got up and help the manget the kidscarryons put awayI was told incorrect information by the flight counter representative which costed me over $450 i did not have. I spoke with numerous customer service reps who were all very rude and unhelpful. It is not fair for the customer to have to pay the price for being told incorrect got a great price on this flight. Unfortunately, we were going on a cruise and had to take luggage. By the time we added our luggage and seats the price more than crew. Very friendly and happy–from the tag your bag kiosk to the ticket desk to the flight crew–everyone was exceptionally happy to help and friendly. We find this to be true of the many Spirit flights we’ve impressed with the Spirit check-in staff at either airport. Very rude and just not inviting. The seats were very comfortable and roomy on my first flight in the exit row. On the way back there was very little cushion and narrow seats. The flight attendants and pilots were respectful, direct, and welcoming. Overall would fly Spirit again, but please improve airport staff at autiful Soup is a very powerful tool for web scraping. But when JavaScript kicks in and hides content, Selenium with Beautiful Soup does the job of web scraping. Selenium can also be used to navigate to the next page. You can also use Scrapy or some other scraping tools instead of Beautiful Soup for web scraping. And finally after collecting the data, you can feed the data for data science work.
How can I parse a website using Selenium … – Stack Overflow
New to programming and figured out how to navigate to where I need to go using Selenium. I’d like to parse the data now but not sure where to start. Can someone hold my hand a sec and point me in the right direction?
Any help appreciated –
asked Dec 19 ’12 at 20:06
3
Assuming you are on the page you want to parse, Selenium stores the source HTML in the driver’s page_source attribute. You would then load the page_source into BeautifulSoup as follows:
In [8]: from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
In [9]: from selenium import webdriver
In [10]: driver = refox()
In [11]: (”)
In [12]: html = ge_source
In [13]: soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
In [14]: for tag in nd_all(‘title’):…. : print…. :…. :
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answered Dec 19 ’12 at 20:19
RocketDonkeyRocketDonkey33. 7k7 gold badges75 silver badges83 bronze badges
8
As your question isn’t particularly concrete, here’s a simple example. To do something more useful read the BS docs. You will also find plenty of examples of selenium (and BS)usage here in SO.
from selenium import webdriver
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
refox()
(”)
soup=BeautifulSoup(ge_source)
#do something useful
#prints all the links with corresponding text
for link in nd_all(‘a’):
print (‘href’, None), t_text()
answered Dec 19 ’12 at 20:18
6
Are you sure you want to use Selenium? For this reasons I used PyQt4, it’s very powerful, and you can do what ever you want.
I can give you a sample code, that I just wrote, just change url and you good to go:
#! /usr/bin/env python2. 7
from import *
from PyQt4. QtWebKit import *
import sys, signal
class Browser(QWebView):
def __init__(self):
QWebView. __init__(self)
nnect(self. _progress)
nnect(self. _loadFinished)
= (). currentFrame()
def _progress(self, progress):
print str(progress) + “%”
def _loadFinished(self):
print “Load Finished”
html = unicode(())(‘utf-8’)
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
print ettify()
()
if __name__ == “__main__”:
app = QApplication()
br = Browser()
url = QUrl(‘web site that can contain ‘)
(url)
if (, G_DFL):
(app. exec_())
app. exec_()
answered Dec 19 ’12 at 20:14
VorVor28. 8k39 gold badges123 silver badges186 bronze badges
5
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Better web scraping in Python with Selenium, Beautiful Soup
by Dave GrayWeb ScrapingUsing the Python programming language, it is possible to “scrape” data from the web in a quick and efficient scraping is defined as:a tool for turning the unstructured data on the web into machine readable, structured data which is ready for analysis. (source)Web scraping is a valuable tool in the data scientist’s skill, what to scrape? “Search drill down options” == Keep clicking until you find what you licly Available DataThe KanView website supports “Transparency in Government”. That is also the slogan of the site. The site provides payroll data for the State of Kansas. And that’s great! Yet, like many government websites, it buries the data in drill-down links and tables. This often requires “best guess navigation” to find the specific data you are looking for. I wanted to use the public data provided for the universities within Kansas in a research project. Scraping the data with Python and saving it as JSON was what I needed to do to get Script links increase the complexityWeb scraping with Python often requires no more than the use of the Beautiful Soup module to reach the goal. Beautiful Soup is a popular Python library that makes web scraping by traversing the DOM (document object model) easier to ever, the KanView website uses JavaScript links. Therefore, examples using Python and Beautiful Soup will not work without some extra additions. to the rescueThe Selenium package is used to automate web browser interaction from Python. With Selenium, programming a Python script to automate a web browser is possible. Afterwards, those pesky JavaScript links are no longer an selenium import webdriver
from import Keys
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re
import pandas as pd
import osSelenium will now start a browser session. For Selenium to work, it must access the browser driver. By default, it will look in the same directory as the Python script. Links to Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari drivers available here. The example code below uses Firefox:#launch url
url = ”
# create a new Firefox session
driver = refox()
plicitly_wait(30)
(url)
python_button = nd_element_by_id(‘MainContent_uxLevel1_Agencies_uxAgencyBtn_33’) #FHSU
() #click fhsu linkThe () above is telling Selenium to click the JavaScript link on the page. After arriving at the Job Titles page, Selenium hands off the page source to Beautiful Soup. to Beautiful SoupBeautiful Soup remains the best way to traverse the DOM and scrape the data. After defining an empty list and a counter variable, it is time to ask Beautiful Soup to grab all the links on the page that match a regular expression:#Selenium hands the page source to Beautiful Soup
soup_level1=BeautifulSoup(ge_source, ‘lxml’)
datalist = [] #empty list
x = 0 #counter
for link in nd_all(‘a’, mpile(“^MainContent_uxLevel2_JobTitles_uxJobTitleBtn_”)):
##code to execute in for loop goes hereYou can see from the example above that Beautiful Soup will retrieve a JavaScript link for each job title at the state agency. Now in the code block of the for / in loop, Selenium will click each JavaScript link. Beautiful Soup will then retrieve the table from each page. #Beautiful Soup grabs all Job Title links
#Selenium visits each Job Title page
python_button = nd_element_by_id(‘MainContent_uxLevel2_JobTitles_uxJobTitleBtn_’ + str(x))
() #click link
#Selenium hands of the source of the specific job page to Beautiful Soup
soup_level2=BeautifulSoup(ge_source, ‘lxml’)
#Beautiful Soup grabs the HTML table on the page
table = nd_all(‘table’)[0]
#Giving the HTML table to pandas to put in a dataframe object
df = ad_html(str(table), header=0)
#Store the dataframe in a list
(df[0])
#Ask Selenium to click the back button
driver. execute_script(“(-1)”)
#increment the counter variable before starting the loop over
x += 1 Python Data Analysis LibraryBeautiful Soup passes the findings to pandas. Pandas uses its read_html function to read the HTML table data into a dataframe. The dataframe is appended to the previously defined empty the code block of the loop is complete, Selenium needs to click the back button in the browser. This is so the next link in the loop will be available to click on the job listing the for / in loop has completed, Selenium has visited every job title link. Beautiful Soup has retrieved the table from each page. Pandas has stored the data from each table in a dataframe. Each dataframe is an item in the datalist. The individual table dataframes must now merge into one large dataframe. The data will then be converted to JSON format with _json:#loop has completed
#end the Selenium browser session
()
#combine all pandas dataframes in the list into one big dataframe
result = ([Frame(datalist[i]) for i in range(len(datalist))], ignore_index=True)
#convert the pandas dataframe to JSON
json_records = _json(orient=’records’)Now Python creates the JSON data file. It is ready for use! #get current working directory
path = ()
#open, write, and close the file
f = open(path + “\”, “w”) #FHSU
(json_records)
()The automated process is fastThe automated web scraping process described above completes quickly. Selenium opens a browser window you can see working. This allows me to show you a screen capture video of how fast the process is. You see how fast the script follows a link, grabs the data, goes back, and clicks the next link. It makes retrieving the data from hundreds of links a matter of single-digit full Python codeHere is the full Python code. I have included an import for tabulate. It requires an extra line of code that will use tabulate to pretty print the data to your command line interface:from selenium import webdriver
from tabulate import tabulate
import os
#launch url
#After opening the url above, Selenium clicks the specific agency link
() #click fhsu link
#Selenium hands the page source to Beautiful Soup
#Beautiful Soup finds all Job Title links on the agency page and the loop begins
x += 1
#end loop block
#loop has completed
json_records = _json(orient=’records’)
#pretty print to CLI with tabulate
#converts to an ascii table
print(tabulate(result, headers=[“Employee Name”, “Job Title”, “Overtime Pay”, “Total Gross Pay”], tablefmt=’psql’))
#get current working directory
()Photo by Artem Sapegin on UnsplashConclusionWeb scraping with Python and Beautiful Soup is an excellent tool to have within your skillset. Use web scraping when the data you need to work with is available to the public, but not necessarily conveniently available. When JavaScript provides or “hides” content, browser automation with Selenium will insure your code “sees” what you (as a user) should see. And finally, when you are scraping tables full of data, pandas is the Python data analysis library that will handle it ference:The following article was a helpful reference for this project: out to me any time on LinkedIn or Twitter. And if you liked this article, give it a few claps. I will sincerely appreciate it. Gray (@yesdavidgray) | TwitterThe latest Tweets from Dave Gray (@yesdavidgray). Instructor @FHSUInformatics * Developer * Musician * Entrepreneur *…
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Frequently Asked Questions about selenium and beautifulsoup python
Can I use Beautiful Soup with Selenium?
Dynamic Scraping With Selenium WebDriver In this case, if you attempt to parse the data using Beautiful Soup, your parser won’t find any data. The information first must be rendered by JavaScript. In this type of application, you can use Selenium to get prices for cards.Feb 18, 2021
What is Selenium Beautiful Soup?
When used together, Selenium and Beautiful Soup are powerful tools that allow the user to web scrape data efficiently and quickly.Mar 14, 2021
What is difference between Selenium and Beautiful Soup?
Comparing selenium vs BeautifulSoup allows you to see that BeautifulSoup is more user-friendly and allows you to learn faster and begin web scraping smaller tasks easier. Selenium on the other hand is important when the target website has a lot of java elements in its code.Feb 10, 2021