I am scraping a website but it only shows a portion of the website at the bottom it has a view more button. Is there anyway to view everything on the webpage via python?
BeautifulSoup just parses the returned HTML. It doesn't execute JavaScript, which is often used to load new content or to modify the existing webpage after it has loaded.
You'll need to execute the JavaScript, which requires more than just an HTML parser. You basically need to use a browser. There are a few Python packages to do this:
Selenium
Ghost.py
Related
I am trying to create a script to download an ebook into a pdf. When I try to use beautifulsoup in it I to print the contents of a single page, I get a message in the console stating "Oh no! It looks like JavaScript is disabled in your browser. Please re-enable to access the reader."
I have already enabled Javascript in Chrome and this same piece of code works for a page like a stackO answer page. What could be blocking Javascript in this page and how can I bypass it?
My code for reference:
url = requests.get("https://platform.virdocs.com/r/s/0/doc/350551/sp/14552484/mi/47443495/?cfi=%2F4%2F2%5BP7001013978000000000000000003FF2%5D%2F2%2F2%5BP7001013978000000000000000010019%5D%2F2%2C%2F1%3A0%2C%2F1%3A0")
url.raise_for_status()
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(url.text, "html.parser")
elems = soup.select("p")
print(elems[0].getText())
The problem is that the page actually contains no content. To load the content it needs to run some JS code. The requests.get method does not run JS, it just loads the basic HTML.
What you need to do is to emulate a browser, i.e. 'open' the page, run JS, and then scrape content. One way to do it is to use a browser driver as described here - https://stackoverflow.com/a/57912823/9805867
I need to scrape a site with python. I obtain the source html code with the urlib module, but I need to scrape also some html code that is generated by a javascript function (which is included in the html source). What this functions does "in" the site is that when you press a button it outputs some html code. How can I "press" this button with python code? Can scrapy help me? I captured the POST request with firebug but when I try to pass it on the url I get a 403 error. Any suggestions?
In Python, I think Selenium 1.0 is the way to go. It’s a library that allows you to control a real web browser from your language of choice.
You need to have the web browser in question installed on the machine your script runs on, but it looks like the most reliable way to programmatically interrogate websites that use a lot of JavaScript.
Since there is no comprehensive answer here, I'll go ahead and write one.
To scrape off JS rendered pages, we will need a browser that has a JavaScript engine (e.i, support JavaScript rendering)
Options like Mechanize, url2lib will not work since they DO NOT support JavaScript.
So here's what you do:
Setup PhantomJS to run with Selenium. After installing the dependencies for both of them (refer this), you can use the following code as an example to fetch the fully rendered website.
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()
driver.get('http://jokes.cc.com/')
soupFromJokesCC = BeautifulSoup(driver.page_source) #page_source fetches page after rendering is complete
driver.save_screenshot('screen.png') # save a screenshot to disk
driver.quit()
I have had to do this before (in .NET) and you are basically going to have to host a browser, get it to click the button, and then interrogate the DOM (document object model) of the browser to get at the generated HTML.
This is definitely one of the downsides to web apps moving towards an Ajax/Javascript approach to generating HTML client-side.
I use webkit, which is the browser renderer behind Chrome and Safari. There are Python bindings to webkit through Qt. And here is a full example to execute JavaScript and extract the final HTML.
For Scrapy (great python scraping framework) there is scrapyjs: an additional downloader handler / middleware handler able to scraping javascript generated content.
It's based on webkit engine by pygtk, python-webkit, and python-jswebkit and it's quite simple.
I use the python requests (http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/) library in order to download and parse particular web pages. This works fine as long as the page is not dynamic. Things look different if the page under consideration uses javascript.
In particular, I am talking about a web page that automatically loads more content once you scrolled to the bottom of the page so that you can continue scrolling. This new content is not included in the page's source text, thus, I can't download it.
I thought about simulating a browser in python (selenium) - is this the right way to go?
I am trying to scrap a website where targeted items are populated using document.write method. How can I get full browser html rendered version of the website in the Scrapy?
You can't do this, as scrapy will not execute the JavaScript code.
What you can do:
Rely on a headless browser like Selenium, which will execute the JavaScript. Afterwards, use XPath (or simple DOM access) like before to query the web page after executing the page.
Understand where the contents come from, and load and parse the source directly instead. Chrome Dev Tools / Firebug might help you with that, have a look at the "Network" panel that shows fetched data.
Especially look for JSON, sometimes also XML.
I am writing a web scraping script in python and I have to download a file. On the website , there is an image <a href="javascript:DownloadMyFile();">. When I click it, it calls a function which brings the dialog to save or open the file. How do I download the file using python directly using beautiful soup?
BeautifulSoup does not render JavaScript, so you have two options:
Figure out what the JavaScript is doing to generate the url that is handed to your browser when you click that anchor.
Write your scraper using something modern like CasperJS -- it can handle JavaScript.