Web-scraping JavaScript page with Python

Question

I'm trying to develop a simple web scraper. I want to extract text without the HTML code. In fact, I achieve this goal, but I have seen that in some pages where JavaScript is loaded I didn't obtain good results.

For example, if some JavaScript code adds some text, I can't see it, because when I call

response = urllib2.urlopen(request)

I get the original text without the added one (because JavaScript is executed in the client).

So, I'm looking for some ideas to solve this problem.

Answer 1

Using PyQt5

from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication
from PyQt5.QtCore import QUrl
from PyQt5.QtWebEngineWidgets import QWebEnginePage
import sys
import bs4 as bs
import urllib.request


class Client(QWebEnginePage):
    def __init__(self,url):
        global app
        self.app = QApplication(sys.argv)
        QWebEnginePage.__init__(self)
        self.html = ""
        self.loadFinished.connect(self.on_load_finished)
        self.load(QUrl(url))
        self.app.exec_()

    def on_load_finished(self):
        self.html = self.toHtml(self.Callable)
        print("Load Finished")

    def Callable(self,data):
        self.html = data
        self.app.quit()

#url = ""
#client_response = Client(url)
#print(client_response.html)

Answer 2

This seems to be a good solution also, taken from a great blog post

import sys  
from PyQt4.QtGui import *  
from PyQt4.QtCore import *  
from PyQt4.QtWebKit import *  
from lxml import html 

#Take this class for granted.Just use result of rendering.
class Render(QWebPage):  
  def __init__(self, url):  
    self.app = QApplication(sys.argv)  
    QWebPage.__init__(self)  
    self.loadFinished.connect(self._loadFinished)  
    self.mainFrame().load(QUrl(url))  
    self.app.exec_()  

  def _loadFinished(self, result):  
    self.frame = self.mainFrame()  
    self.app.quit()  

url = 'http://pycoders.com/archive/'  
r = Render(url)  
result = r.frame.toHtml()
# This step is important.Converting QString to Ascii for lxml to process

# The following returns an lxml element tree
archive_links = html.fromstring(str(result.toAscii()))
print archive_links

# The following returns an array containing the URLs
raw_links = archive_links.xpath('//div[@class="campaign"]/a/@href')
print raw_links

Answer 3

If you have ever used the Requests module for python before, I recently found out that the developer created a new module called Requests-HTML which now also has the ability to render JavaScript.

You can also visit https://html.python-requests.org/ to learn more about this module, or if your only interested about rendering JavaScript then you can visit https://html.python-requests.org/?#javascript-support to directly learn how to use the module to render JavaScript using Python.

Essentially, Once you correctly install the Requests-HTML module, the following example, which is shown on the above link, shows how you can use this module to scrape a website and render JavaScript contained within the website:

from requests_html import HTMLSession
session = HTMLSession()

r = session.get('http://python-requests.org/')

r.html.render()

r.html.search('Python 2 will retire in only {months} months!')['months']

'<time>25</time>' #This is the result.

I recently learnt about this from a YouTube video. Click Here! to watch the YouTube video, which demonstrates how the module works.

Answer 4

I personally prefer using scrapy and selenium and dockerizing both in separate containers. This way you can install both with minimal hassle and crawl modern websites that almost all contain javascript in one form or another. Here's an example:

Use the scrapy startproject to create your scraper and write your spider, the skeleton can be as simple as this:

import scrapy


class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'my_spider'
    start_urls = ['https://somewhere.com']

    def start_requests(self):
        yield scrapy.Request(url=self.start_urls[0])


    def parse(self, response):

        # do stuff with results, scrape items etc.
        # now were just checking everything worked

        print(response.body)

The real magic happens in the middlewares.py. Overwrite two methods in the downloader middleware, __init__ and process_request, in the following way:

# import some additional modules that we need
import os
from copy import deepcopy
from time import sleep

from scrapy import signals
from scrapy.http import HtmlResponse
from selenium import webdriver

class SampleProjectDownloaderMiddleware(object):

def __init__(self):
    SELENIUM_LOCATION = os.environ.get('SELENIUM_LOCATION', 'NOT_HERE')
    SELENIUM_URL = f'http://{SELENIUM_LOCATION}:4444/wd/hub'
    chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()

    # chrome_options.add_experimental_option("mobileEmulation", mobile_emulation)
    self.driver = webdriver.Remote(command_executor=SELENIUM_URL,
                                   desired_capabilities=chrome_options.to_capabilities())


def process_request(self, request, spider):

    self.driver.get(request.url)

    # sleep a bit so the page has time to load
    # or monitor items on page to continue as soon as page ready
    sleep(4)

    # if you need to manipulate the page content like clicking and scrolling, you do it here
    # self.driver.find_element_by_css_selector('.my-class').click()

    # you only need the now properly and completely rendered html from your page to get results
    body = deepcopy(self.driver.page_source)

    # copy the current url in case of redirects
    url = deepcopy(self.driver.current_url)

    return HtmlResponse(url, body=body, encoding='utf-8', request=request)

Dont forget to enable this middlware by uncommenting the next lines in the settings.py file:

DOWNLOADER_MIDDLEWARES = {
'sample_project.middlewares.SampleProjectDownloaderMiddleware': 543,}

Next for dockerization. Create your Dockerfile from a lightweight image (I'm using python Alpine here), copy your project directory to it, install requirements:

# Use an official Python runtime as a parent image
FROM python:3.6-alpine

# install some packages necessary to scrapy and then curl because it's  handy for debugging
RUN apk --update add linux-headers libffi-dev openssl-dev build-base libxslt-dev libxml2-dev curl python-dev

WORKDIR /my_scraper

ADD requirements.txt /my_scraper/

RUN pip install -r requirements.txt

ADD . /scrapers

And finally bring it all together in docker-compose.yaml:

version: '2'
services:
  selenium:
    image: selenium/standalone-chrome
    ports:
      - "4444:4444"
    shm_size: 1G

  my_scraper:
    build: .
    depends_on:
      - "selenium"
    environment:
      - SELENIUM_LOCATION=samplecrawler_selenium_1
    volumes:
      - .:/my_scraper
    # use this command to keep the container running
    command: tail -f /dev/null

Run docker-compose up -d. If you're doing this the first time it will take a while for it to fetch the latest selenium/standalone-chrome and the build your scraper image as well.

Once it's done, you can check that your containers are running with docker ps and also check that the name of the selenium container matches that of the environment variable that we passed to our scraper container (here, it was SELENIUM_LOCATION=samplecrawler_selenium_1).

Enter your scraper container with docker exec -ti YOUR_CONTAINER_NAME sh , the command for me was docker exec -ti samplecrawler_my_scraper_1 sh, cd into the right directory and run your scraper with scrapy crawl my_spider.

The entire thing is on my github page and you can get it from here

Answer 5

You'll want to use urllib, requests, beautifulSoup and selenium web driver in your script for different parts of the page, (to name a few).
Sometimes you'll get what you need with just one of these modules.
Sometimes you'll need two, three, or all of these modules.
Sometimes you'll need to switch off the js on your browser.
Sometimes you'll need header info in your script.
No websites can be scraped the same way and no website can be scraped in the same way forever without having to modify your crawler, usually after a few months. But they can all be scraped! Where there's a will there's a way for sure.
If you need scraped data continuously into the future just scrape everything you need and store it in .dat files with pickle.
Just keep searching how to try what with these modules and copying and pasting your errors into the Google.

Answer 6

Selenium is the best for scraping JS and Ajax content.

Check this article https://likegeeks.com/python-web-scraping/

$ pip install selenium

Then download Chrome webdriver.

from selenium import webdriver

browser = webdriver.Chrome()

browser.get("https://www.python.org/")

nav = browser.find_element_by_id("mainnav")

print(nav.text)

Easy, right?