I have been trying to scrape facebook comments using Beautiful Soup on the below website pages.
import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2
import re
url = 'http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/15/facebook-lightbox/'
fd = urllib2.urlopen(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(fd)
fb_comment = soup("div", {"class":"postText"}).find(text=True)
print fb_comment
The output is a null set. However, I can clearly see the facebook comment is within those above tags in the inspect element of the techcrunch site (I am little new to Python and was wondering if the approach is correct and where I am going wrong?)
Like Christopher and Thiefmaster: it is all because of javascript.
But, if you really need that information, you can still retrieve it thanks to Selenium on http://seleniumhq.org then use beautifulsoup on this output.
Facebook comments are loaded dynamically using AJAX. You can scrape the original page to retrieve this:
<fb:comments href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/15/facebook-lightbox/" num_posts="25" width="630"></fb:comments>
After that you need to send a request to some Facebook API that will give you the comments for the URL in that tag.
The parts of the page you are looking for are not included in the source file. Use a browser and you can see this for yourself by opening the page source.
You will need to use something like pywebkitgtk to have the javascript executed before passing the document to BeautifulSoup
Related
I am kinda a newbie in data world. So i tried to use bs4 and requests to scrap data from trending youtube videos. I have tried using soup.findall() method. To see if it works i displayed it. But it gives me an empty list. Can you help me fix it? Click here to see the spesific part of the html code.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
r = requests.get("https://www.youtube.com/feed/explore")
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content,"lxml")
soup.prettify()
trendings = soup.find_all("ytd-video-renderer",attrs = {"class":"style-scope ytd-expanded-
shelf-contents-renderer"})
print(trending)
This webpage is dynamic and contains scripts to load data. Whenever you make a request using requests.get("https://www.youtube.com/feed/explore"), it loads the initial source code file that only contains information like head, meta, etc, and scripts. In a real-world scenario, you will have to wait until scripts load data from the server. BeautifulSoup does not catch the interactions with DOM via JavaScript. That's why soup.find_all("ytd-video-renderer",attrs = {"class":"style-scope ytd-expanded-shelf-contents-renderer"}) gives you empty list as there is no ytd-video-renderer tag or style-scope ytd-expanded-shelf-contents-renderer class.
For dynamic webpages, I think you should use Selenium (or maybe Scrapy).
For Youtube, you can use it's API as well.
I am trying to scrape a website. I have tried using two methods but both do not provide me with the full website source code that I am looking for. I am trying to scrape the news titles from the website URL provided below.
URL: "https://www.todayonline.com/"
These are the two methods I have tried but failed.
Method 1: Beautiful Soup
tdy_url = "https://www.todayonline.com/"
page = requests.get(tdy_url).text
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
soup # Returns me a HTML with javascript text
soup.find_all('h3')
### Returns me empty list []
Method 2: Selenium + BeautifulSoup
tdy_url = "https://www.todayonline.com/"
options = Options()
options.headless = True
driver = webdriver.Chrome("chromedriver",options=options)
driver.get(tdy_url)
time.sleep(10)
html = driver.page_source
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
soup.find_all('h3')
### Returns me only less than 1/4 of the 'h3' tags found in the original page source
Please help. I have tried scraping other news websites and it is so much easier. Thank you.
The news data on the website you are trying to scrape is fetched from the server using JavaScript (this is called XHR -- XMLHttpRequest). It is happening dynamically, while the page is loading or being scrolled. so this data is not returned inside the page returned by the server.
In the first example, you are getting only the page returned by the server -- without the news, but with JS that is supposed to get them. Neither requests nor BeautifulSoup can execute JS.
However, you can try to reproduce requests that are getting news titles from the server with Python requests. Do the following steps:
Open DevTools of your browser (usually you have to press F12 or the combination of Ctrl+Shift+I for that), and take a look at requests that are getting news titles from the server. Sometimes, it is even easier than web scraping with BeautifulSoup. Here is a screenshot (Firefox):
Copy the request link (right-click -> Copy -> Copy link), and pass it to requests.get(...).
Get .json() of the request. It will return a dict that is easy to work with. To better understand the structure of the dict, I would recommend to use pprint instead of simple print. Note you have to do from pprint import pprint before using it.
Here is an example of the code that gets the titles from the main news on the page:
import requests
nodes = requests.get("https://www.todayonline.com/api/v3/news_feed/7")\
.json()["nodes"]
for node in nodes:
print(node["node"]["title"])
If you want to scrape a group of news under caption, you need to change the number after news_feed/ in the request URL (to get it, you just need to filter the requests by "news_feed" in the DevTools and scroll the news page down).
Sometimes web sites have protection against bots (although the website you are trying to scrape doesn't). In such cases, you might need to do these steps as well.
You can access data via API (check out the Network tab):
For example,
import requests
url = "https://www.todayonline.com/api/v3/news_feed/7"
data = requests.get(url).json()
I will suggest you the fairly simple approach,
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
page = requests.get('https://www.todayonline.com/googlenews.xml').content
soup = bs(page)
news = [i.text for i in soup.find_all('news:title')]
print(news)
output
['DBS named world’s best bank by New York-based financial publication',
'Russia has very serious questions to answer on Navalny - UK',
"Exclusive: 90% of China's Sinovac employees, families took coronavirus vaccine - CEO",
'Three militants killed after fatal attack on policeman in Tunisia',
.....]
Also, you can check the XML page for more information if required.
P.S. Always check for the compliance before scraping any website :)
There are different ways of gathering the content of a webpage that contains Javascript.
Using selenium with Firefox web driver
Using a headless browser with phantomJS
Making an API call using a REST client or python requests library
You have to do your research first
I'm learning to make web scrapers and want to scrape TripAdvisor for a personal project, grabbing the html using urllib2.
However, I'm running into a problem where, using the code below, the html I get back is not correct as the page seems to take a second to redirect (you can verify this by visiting the url) - instead I get the code from the page that initially briefly appears.
Is there some behavior or parameter to set to make sure the page has completely finished loading/redirecting before getting the website content?
import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
bostonPage = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.tripadvisor.com/HACSearch?geo=34438#02,1342106684473,rad:S0,sponsors:ABEST_WESTERN,style:Szff_6")
soup = BeautifulSoup(bostonPage)
print soup.prettify()
Edit: The answer is thorough, however, in the end what solved my problem was this:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/3210737/1157283
Inreresting the problem isn't a redirect is that page modifies the content using javascript, but urllib2 doesn't have a JS engine it just GETS data, if you disabled javascript on your browser you will note it loads basically the same content as what urllib2 returns
import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
bostonPage = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.tripadvisor.com/HACSearch?geo=34438#02,1342106684473,rad:S0,sponsors:ABEST_WESTERN,style:Szff_6")
soup = BeautifulSoup(bostonPage)
open('test.html', 'w').write(soup.read())
test.html and disabling JS in your browser, easiest in firefox content -> uncheck enable javascript, generates identical result sets.
So what can we do well, first we should check if the site offers an API, scrapping tends to be frown up
http://www.tripadvisor.com/help/what_type_of_tripadvisor_content_is_available
Travel/Hotel API's?
it looks they might, though with some restrictions.
But if we still need to scrape it, with JS, then we can use selenium http://seleniumhq.org/ its mainly used for testing, but its easy and has fairly good docs.
I also found this Scraping websites with Javascript enabled? and this http://grep.codeconsult.ch/2007/02/24/crowbar-scrape-javascript-generated-pages-via-gecko-and-rest/
hope that helps.
As a side note:
>>> import urllib2
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>>
>>> bostonPage = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.tripadvisor.com/HACSearch?geo=34438#02,1342106684473,rad:S0,sponsors:ABEST_WESTERN,style:Szff_6")
>>> value = bostonPage.read()
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(value)
>>> open('test.html', 'w').write(value)
I'm trying to extract the Earnings Per Share data through BeautifulSoup 4 from this page.
When I parse the data, the table information is missing using the default, lxml and HTML 5 parsers. I believe this has something to do with Javascript and I have been trying to implement PyV8 to transform the script into readable HTML for BS4. The problem is I don't know where to go from here.
Do you know if this is in fact my issue? I have been reading many posts and it's been a very big headache for me today. Below is a quick example. The financeWrap includes the table information, but beautifulSoup shows that it is empty.
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "http://financials.morningstar.com/ratios/r.html?t=AAPL®ion=usa&culture=en-US"
response = requests.get(url)
soup_key_ratios = bs(response.content, 'html5lib')
financial_tables = soup_key_ratios.find("div", {"id":"financeWrap"})
print financial_tables
# Output: <div id="financeWrap">
# </div>
The issue is that you're trying to get data that is coming in through Ajax on the website. If you go to the link you provided, and looked at the source via the browser, you'll see that there should be no content with the data.
However, if you use a console manager, such as Firebug, you will see that there are Ajax requests made to the following URL, which is something you can parse via beautifulsoup (perhaps - I haven't tried it or looked at the structure of the data).
Keep in mind that this is quite possibly against the website's ToS.
I am attempting to write a program that, as an example, will scrape the top price off of this web page:
http://www.kayak.com/#/flights/JFK-PAR/2012-06-01/2012-07-01/1adults
First, I am easily able to retrieve the HTML by doing the following:
from urllib import urlopen
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import mechanize
webpage = 'http://www.kayak.com/#/flights/JFK-PAR/2012-06-01/2012-07-01/1adults'
br = mechanize.Browser()
data = br.open(webpage).get_data()
soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
print soup
However, the raw HTML does not contain the price. The browser does...it's thing (clarification here might help me also)...and retrieves the price from elsewhere while it constructs the DOM tree.
I was led to believe that mechanize would act just like my browser and return the DOM tree, which I am also led to believe is what I see when I look at, for example, Chrome's Developer Tools view of the page (if I'm incorrect about this, how do I go about getting whatever that price information is stored in?) Is there something that I need to tell mechanize to do in order to see the DOM tree?
Once I can get the DOM tree into python, everything else I need to do should be a snap. Thanks!
Mechanize and Beautiful soup are un-beatable tools web-scraping in python.
But you need to understand what is meant for what:
Mechanize : It mimics the browser functionality on a webpage.
BeautifulSoup : HTML parser, works well even when HTML is not well-formed.
Your problem seems to be javascript. The price is getting populated via an ajax call using javascript. Mechanize, however, does not do javascript, so any content that results from javascript will remain invisible to mechanize.
Take a look at this : http://github.com/davisp/python-spidermonkey/tree/master
This does a wrapper on mechanize and Beautiful soup with js execution.
Answering my own question because in the years since asking this I have learned a lot. Today I would use Selenium Webdriver to do this job. Selenium is exactly the tool I was looking for back in 2012 for this type of web scraping project.
https://www.seleniumhq.org/download/
http://chromedriver.chromium.org/