Selenium For Web Scraping Python

Posted on |



  • Related Questions & Answers

In this tutorial you’ll learn advanced Python web automation techniques: using Selenium with a “headless” browser, exporting the scraped data to CSV files, and wrapping your scraping code in a Python class. Motivation: Tracking Listening Habits. May 25, 2020 There are a number of web scraping tools out there to perform the task and various languages too, having libraries that support web scraping. Among all these languages, Python is considered as one of the best for Web Scraping because of features like – a rich library, easy to use, dynamically typed, etc.

  • Selected Reading
SeleniumAutomation TestingTesting Tools

We can parse a website using Selenium and Beautiful Soup in Python. Web Scraping is a concept used to extract content from the web pages, used extensively in Data Science and metrics preparation. In Python, it is achieved with the BeautifulSoup package.

To have BeautifulSoup along with Selenium, we should run the command −

Let us scrap the below links appearing on the page −

Then investigate the html structure of the above elements −

Example

Output

It is a well-known fact that Python is one of the most popular programming languages for data mining and Web Scraping. There are tons of libraries and niche scrapers around the community, but we’d like to share the 5 most popular of them.

Office 2011 for mac os. Most of these libraries' advantages can be received by using our API and some of these libraries can be used in stack with it.

The Top 5 Python Web Scraping Libraries in 2020#

1. Requests#

Well known library for most of the Python developers as a fundamental tool to get raw HTML data from web resources.

To install the library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:

After this you can check installation using REPL:

>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/repos/psf/requests')
'A simple, yet elegant HTTP library.'
For
  • Official docs URL: https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
  • GitHub repository: https://github.com/psf/requests

2. LXML#

When we’re talking about the speed and parsing of the HTML we should keep in mind this great library called LXML. This is a real champion in HTML and XML parsing while Web Scraping, so the software based on LXML can be used for scraping of frequently-changing pages like gambling sites that provide odds for live events.

To install the library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:

The LXML Toolkit is a really powerful instrument and the whole functionality can’t be described in just a few words, so the following links might be very useful:

  • Official docs URL: https://lxml.de/index.html#documentation
  • GitHub repository: https://github.com/lxml/lxml/

3. BeautifulSoup#

Probably 80% of all the Python Web Scraping tutorials on the Internet uses the BeautifulSoup4 library as a simple tool for dealing with retrieved HTML in the most human-preferable way. Selectors, attributes, DOM-tree, and much more. The perfect choice for porting code to or from Javascript's Cheerio or jQuery.

To install this library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:

As it was mentioned before, there are a bunch of tutorials around the Internet about BeautifulSoup4 usage, so do not hesitate to Google it!

Web
  • Official docs URL: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/
  • Launchpad repository: https://code.launchpad.net/~leonardr/beautifulsoup/bs4

4. Selenium#

Selenium is the most popular Web Driver that has a lot of wrappers suitable for most programming languages. Quality Assurance engineers, automation specialists, developers, data scientists - all of them at least once used this perfect tool. For the Web Scraping it’s like a Swiss Army knife - there are no additional libraries needed because any action can be performed with a browser like a real user: page opening, button click, form filling, Captcha resolving, and much more.

To install this library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:

The code below describes how easy Web Crawling can be started with using Selenium:

from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
assert'Python'in driver.title
elem.send_keys('pycon')
assert'No results found.'notin driver.page_source
Python

As this example only illustrates 1% of the Selenium power, we’d like to offer of following useful links:

  • Official docs URL: https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/
  • GitHub repository: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium

5. Scrapy#

Selenium For Web Scraping Python

Scrapy is the greatest Web Scraping framework, and it was developed by a team with a lot of enterprise scraping experience. The software created on top of this library can be a crawler, scraper, and data extractor or even all this together.

To install this library just execute the following PyPI command in your command prompt or Terminal:

We definitely suggest you start with a tutorial to know more about this piece of gold: https://docs.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/tutorial.html

Using Selenium For Web Scraping Python

As usual, the useful links are below:

  • Official docs URL: https://docs.scrapy.org/en/latest/index.html
  • GitHub repository: https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy

Selenium For Web Scraping Python Tutorial

What web scraping library to use?#

So, it’s all up to you and up to the task you’re trying to resolve, but always remember to read the Privacy Policy and Terms of the site you’re scraping 😉.