Selenium is a widely used tool for web automation. It comes in handy for automating website tests or helping with web scraping, especially for sites that require javascript to be executed. In this article, I will show you how to get up to speed with Selenium using Python.
What is Selenium?
Selenium’s mission is simple, its purpose is to automate web browsers. If you are in need to always execute the same task on a website. It can be automated with Selenium. This is especially the case when you carry out routine web administration tasks but also when you need to test a website. You can automate it all with Selenium.
With this simple goal, Selenium can be used for many different purposes. For instance web-scraping. Many websites run client-side scripts to present data in an asynchronous way. This can cause issues when you are trying to scrape sites in which data you need is rendered through javascript. Selenium comes to the rescue here by automating the browser to visit the site and run the client-side scripts giving you the required HTML. If you would simply use the python requests package to get HTML from a site that runs client-side code, the rendered HTML won’t be complete.
Jan 13, 2019 In this in depth tutorial series, you will learn how to use Selenium + Python to crawl and interact with almost any websites. Selenium is a Web Browser Automation Tool originally designed to. The answer is yes: QueryStorm lets you use C# inside of Excel and solves both issues, and there is also a Selenium NuGet package we can use for scraping. In addition – you don’t have to worry about writing the code for outputting the results to a CSV/XSLX file. How does QueryStorm solve these issues? Write your first Web Scraping code with Scrapy. We will first quickly take a look at how to setup your system for web scraping and then see how we can build a simple web scraping system for extracting data from Reddit website. 2.1 Set up your system. Scrapy supports both versions of Python 2 and 3.
There are many other cases for using Selenium. In the meantime let’s get to using Selenium with Python.
Python Install Selenium
Before you begin you need to download the driver for your particular browser. This article is written using chrome. Head on to the following URL to download the chrome driver to use with selenium by clicking here.
- With the help of Selenium, we can also scrap the data from the webpages. Here, In this article, we are going to discuss how to scrap multiple pages using selenium. There can be many ways for scraping the data from webpages, we will discuss one of them. Looping over the page number is the most simple way for scraping the data.
- Modern Web Scraping with Python using Scrapy Splash Selenium Become an expert in web scraping and web crawling using Python 3, Scrapy, Splash and Selenium 2nd EDITION (2020).
The next step is to install the necessary Selenium python packages to your environment. It can be done using the following pip command:
Selenium 101
To begin using selenium, you need to instantiate a selenium webdriver. This class will then control the web browser and you can take various actions as if you were the one navigating the browser such as navigating to a URL or clicking on a button. Let’s see how to do that using python.
First, import the necessary modules and instantiate a selenium webdriver. You need to provide the path to the chromedriver.exe you downloaded earlier.
After executing the command, a new browser window will open up specifying that it is being controlled by automated testing software.
In some cases, you get an error when chrome opens and needs to disable the extensions to remove the error message. To pass options to chrome when starting it, use the following code.
Now, let’s navigate to a specific URL, in our case that will be google’s homepage by executing the get function.
Locate, Enter a Value to TextBox
What do you do on google? You search! Let’s use selenium to perform an automated search on google. First, you need to learn how to locate items.
Selenium provides many options to do so. You can find web elements by ID, Name, Text and many others. Read on here to get the full list.
We will be locating the textbox by name. Google’s input textbox has a name of q. Let’s find this element with Selenium.
Once this element is found, enter your search to it. We will search for this site by executing the following method.
Selenium Web Scraping Tutorial
Lastly, send an “Enter” command as you would from your keyboard.
Web Scraping Legal
Wait for an Element to Load
As mentioned earlier, many times the page you are browsing to doesn’t completely load at first, rather it executes client-side code that takes longer to load and you need to wait for these to load before continuing. Selenium provides functionality to achieve this by using the WebDriverWait class. Let’s see how to do this.
TipRanks.com is a site that lets you see the track record and measured performance of any analyst or blogger you come across. We will browse to Apple’s analysis page which upon accessing runs javascript to generate the charts. Our code will wait until these are generated before continuing.
First, we need to import additional modules for our sample such as By, expected_conditions and the WebDriverWait class. ExpectedConditions provide functionality for common conditions that are frequently used when automating web browsers for example to detect the visibility of elements.
After accessing the page, we will wait for a max of 10 seconds until a specific CSS class becomes visible. We are looking for the span.fs-13 that becomes visible until charts complete loading.
Get Page HTML
Once the driver has loaded a page and its rendered completely, either by waiting for elements to load or just navigating to the page. You can extract the page’s rendered HTML quite easily with selenium. This can then be processed using BeautifulSoup or other packages to get information from them.
Selenium Web Scraping C#
Run the following command to get the page HTML.
Conclusion
Selenium makes web automation very easy allowing you to perform advanced tasks by automating your web browser. We learned how to get Selenium ready to use with Python and its most important tasks such as navigating to a site, locating elements, entering information and waiting for items to load. Hope this article was helpful and stay tuned for more!