02-05-2021

Selenium For Web Scraping Python

Python Web Scraping Example
Using Selenium For Web Scraping Python

Lean how to scrape the web with Selenium and Python with this step by step tutorial. We will use Selenium to automate Hacker News login. Kevin Sahin Updated: 11 February, 2021 8 min read. Manually Opening a Socket and Sending the HTTP Request. The most basic way to perform. 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.

Imagine what would you do if you could automate all the repetitive and boring activities you perform using internet, like checking every day the first results of Google for a given keyword, or download a bunch of files from different websites.

In this post you’ll learn to use Selenium with Python, a Web Scraping tool that simulates a user surfing the Internet. For example, you can use it to automatically look for Google queries and read the results, log in to your social accounts, simulate a user to test your web application, and anything you find in your daily live that it’s repetitive. The possibilities are infinite! 🙂

*All the code in this post has been tested with Python 2.7 and Python 3.4.

Install and use Selenium

Selenium is a python package that can be installed via pip. I recommend that you install it in a virtual environment (using virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper).

To install selenium, you just need to type:

In this post we are going to initialize a Firefox driver — you can install it by visiting their website. However, if you want to work with Chrome or IE, you can find more information here.

Once you have Selenium and Firefox installed, create a python file, selenium_script.py. We are going to initialize a browser using Selenium:

</div><table><tbody><tr><td><div><div>2</div><div>4</div><div>6</div><div>8</div><div>10</div><div>12</div><div>14</div><div>16</div><div>18</div><div>20</div><div>22</div><div>24</div><div>26</div><div>28</div><div>30</div><div>32</div></div></td><td><div><div><span>from </span><span>selenium </span><span>import </span><span>webdriver</span></div><div><span>from </span><span>selenium</span><span>.</span><span>webdriver</span><span>.</span><span>support</span><span>.</span><span>ui </span><span>import </span><span>WebDriverWait</span></div><div><span>from </span><span>selenium</span><span>.</span><span>webdriver</span><span>.</span><span>support </span><span>import </span><span>expected_conditions </span><span>as</span><span>EC</span></div><div><span>from </span><span>selenium</span><span>.</span><span>common</span><span>.</span><span>exceptions </span><span>import </span><span>TimeoutException</span></div><div><span>driver</span><span>=</span><span>webdriver</span><span>.</span><span>Firefox</span><span>(</span><span>)</span></div><div><span>return</span><span>driver</span></div><div><span>driver</span><span>.</span><span>get</span><span>(</span><span>'http://www.google.com'</span><span>)</span></div><div><span>box</span><span>=</span><span>driver</span><span>.</span><span>wait</span><span>.</span><span>until</span><span>(</span><span>EC</span><span>.</span><span>presence_of_element_located</span><span>(</span></div><div><span>button</span><span>=</span><span>driver</span><span>.</span><span>wait</span><span>.</span><span>until</span><span>(</span><span>EC</span><span>.</span><span>element_to_be_clickable</span><span>(</span></div><div><span>box</span><span>.</span><span>send_keys</span><span>(</span><span>query</span><span>)</span></div><div><span>except </span><span>TimeoutException</span><span>:</span></div><div><span>if</span><span>__name__</span><span>'__main__'</span><span>:</span></div><div><span>lookup</span><span>(</span><span>driver</span><span>,</span><span>'Selenium'</span><span>)</span></div><div><span>driver</span><span>.</span><span>quit</span><span>(</span><span>)</span></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>In the previous code:</p><ul><li> the function <span>init_driver</span> initializes a driver instance.<ul><li> creates the driver instance</li><li> adds the <span>WebDriverWait</span> function as an attribute to the driver, so it can be accessed more easily. This function is used to make the driver wait a certain amount of time (here 5 seconds) for an event to occur.</li></ul></li><li> the function <span>lookup</span> takes two arguments: a driver instance and a query lookup (a string).<ul><li> it loads the Google search page</li><li> it waits for the query box element to be located and for the button to be clickable. Note that we are using the <span>WebDriverWait</span> function to wait for these elements to appear.</li><li> Both elements are located by name. Other options would be to locate them by <span><span>ID</span><span>,</span><span>XPATH</span><span>,</span><span>TAG_NAME</span><span>,</span><span>CLASS_NAME</span><span>,</span><span>CSS_SELECTOR</span></span> , etc (see table below). You can find more information here.</li><li> Next, it sends the query into the box element and clicks the search button.</li><li> If either the box or button are not located during the time established in the wait function (here, 5 seconds), the <span>TimeoutException</span> is raised.</li></ul></li><li> the next statement is a conditional that is true only when the script is run directly. This prevents the next statements to run when this file is imported.<ul><li> it initializes the driver and calls the lookup function to look for “Selenium”.</li><li> it waits for 5 seconds to see the results and quits the driver</li></ul></li></ul><p>Finally, run your code with:</p><p>Did it work? If you got an <span>ElementNotVisibleException</span> , keep reading!</p><h2>How to catch an ElementNotVisibleExcpetion</h2><p>Google search has recently changed so that initially, Google shows this page:</p><p>and when you start writing your query, the search button moves into the upper part of the screen.</p><p>Well, actually it doesn’t move. The old button becomes invisible and the new one visible (and thus the exception when you click the old one: it’s not visible to click!).</p><p>We can update the lookup function in our code so that it catches this exception:</p><div><textarea wrap='soft' readonly='>from selenium.common.exceptions import ElementNotVisibleException def lookup(driver, query): driver.get('http://www.google.com') try: box = driver.wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located( (By.NAME, 'q'))) button = driver.wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable( (By.NAME, 'btnK'))) box.send_keys(query) try: button.click() except ElementNotVisibleException: button = driver.wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located( (By.NAME, 'btnG'))) button.click() except TimeoutException: print('Box or Button not found in google.com')

from selenium.common.exceptions import ElementNotVisibleException

def lookup(driver,query):

try:

box=driver.wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located(

button=driver.wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable(

box.send_keys(query)

button.click()

button=driver.wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located(

button.click()

print('Box or Button not found in google.com')

the element that raised the exception, button.click() is inside a try statement.
if the exception is raised, we look for the second button, using visibility_of_element_located to make sure the element is visible, and then click this button.
if at any time, some element is not found within the 5 second period, the TimeoutException is raised and caught by the two end lines of code.
Note that the initial button name is “btnK” and the new one is “btnG”.

Method list in Selenium

To sum up, I’ve created a table with the main methods used here.

Selenium for web scraping python tutorial

Note: it’s not a python file — don’t try to run/import it 🙂

</div><img src='https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BNGf8QWxKEY/Xe_Z88F845I/AAAAAAAAA9w/b7ro7pSO-T0p7iEhvSYotsaM8_dnjPvJgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/web_scrapping_part_5_scrape_facebook.png' alt='Python' title='Python' /><table><tbody><tr><td><div><div>2</div><div>4</div><div>6</div><div>8</div><div>10</div><div>12</div><div>14</div><div>16</div><div>18</div><div>20</div><div>22</div><div>24</div><div>26</div><div>28</div><div>30</div><div>32</div></div></td><td><div><div><span>from </span><span>selenium </span><span>import </span><span>webdriver</span></div><div><span>from </span><span>selenium</span><span>.</span><span>webdriver</span><span>.</span><span>support</span><span>.</span><span>ui </span><span>import </span><span>WebDriverWait</span></div><div><span>driver</span><span>=</span><span>webdriver</span><span>.</span><span>Firefox</span><span>(</span><span>)</span></div><div><span># WAIT FOR ELEMENTS</span></div><div><span>from </span><span>selenium</span><span>.</span><span>webdriver</span><span>.</span><span>support </span><span>import </span><span>expected_conditions </span><span>as</span><span>EC</span></div><div><span>element</span><span>=</span><span>driver</span><span>.</span><span>wait</span><span>.</span><span>until</span><span>(</span></div><div><span>EC</span><span>.</span><span>element_to_be_clickable</span><span>(</span></div><div><span>(</span><span>By</span><span>.</span><span>NAME</span><span>,</span><span>'name'</span><span>)</span></div><div><span>(</span><span>By</span><span>.</span><span>LINK_TEXT</span><span>,</span><span>'link text'</span><span>)</span></div><div><span>(</span><span>By</span><span>.</span><span>TAG_NAME</span><span>,</span><span>'tag name'</span><span>)</span></div><div><span>(</span><span>By</span><span>.</span><span>CSS_SELECTOR</span><span>,</span><span>'css selector'</span><span>)</span></div><div><span>)</span></div><div><span># CATCH EXCEPTIONS</span></div><div><span>TimeoutException</span></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><h3 id='python-web-scraping-example'>Python Web Scraping Example</h3><p>That’s all! Hope it was useful! 🙂</p><p>Don’t forget to share it with your friends!</p><ul><li> Related Questions & Answers</li></ul><ul><li>Selected Reading</li></ul><div><span>Selenium</span><span>Automation Testing</span><span>Testing Tools</span></div><p>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 <strong>BeautifulSoup</strong> package.</p><p>To have BeautifulSoup along with Selenium, we should run the command −</p><p>Let us scrap the below links appearing on the page −</p><p>Then investigate the html structure of the above elements −</p><h2>Example</h2><h3 id='using-selenium-for-web-scraping-python'>Using Selenium For Web Scraping Python</h3><h2>Output</h2><br><br><a href='https://netlify.mix-goapp.com/reader-9-for-mac.html#hqCW=UFVEE1RTUAYDFgxXVFYMX1oLDltJRQEJBAtRRF8TAw5GT0UEVR5KABMCSAsKARJITxdRDAsaVVRQSQgdQkoKBkYFX0paVFpIUk8UV0pUCQoHTwxPVxoBC0wwax0DCVJYGgpXFVtcXxpPAkgSSEpNXU4XSkZWV0FWADY=' target='_blank'><img src='https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/r/ruriatunifoefec/20200910/20200910011346.png' style='cursor:pointer;display:block;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;'></a><br><br></p>
																						
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