Are you trying to access a large amount of data? Does automating the data-collection process sound enticing to you? If you’re still hiring data entry clerks to copy and paste data from websites into spreadsheets, you’re doing things the wrong way.
There are several popular tools and libraries used for web scraping, such as Beautiful Soup, Scrapy, Octoparse, Parsehub, and WebHarvy. It’s worth mentioning that the choice of tool depends on the specific requirements of your web scraping project. You should always evaluate the highly rated tools and choose the one that best fits your needs. Today, you will learn about Selenium.
Web Scraping With Selenium
Selenium is a browser automation tool that can be helpful for web scraping, in addition to other automation tasks such as testing web applications. Selenium allows you to automate the interaction with a web page, such as clicking buttons, filling out forms, and navigating between pages. This can be important when scraping data loaded dynamically or accessed by interacting with a page.
With Selenium, you can programmatically control a web browser, such as Chrome or Firefox, and interact with the web pages like a real user. Selenium can automate the execution of JavaScript and retrieve data from the Document Object Model (DOM) after the page loads completely. For more information, check out https://iproyal.com/blog/web-scraping-with-selenium-and-python/.
When scraping with Selenium, you first need to initialize a web driver, which controls the browser. Then, you can use the web driver to navigate to a webpage and interact with it. The driver can help you find elements on the page, such as buttons or input fields, and interact with them. You can also extract data from the page by finding the parts that contain the data you are interested in and retrieving the text or attributes of those elements.
Selenium is particularly beneficial when you need to scrape data that is loaded dynamically or when you need to interact with a page in some way before the data loads. Such interaction may include filling out a form or clicking a button. Selenium also allows you to use a headless browser, which can improve performance and reduce the need to open unnecessary windows.
However, Selenium requires more resources than more straightforward scraping methods. The execution of the script can be slow, as it needs to wait for the page to load before interacting with it. Additionally, Selenium has a steeper learning curve than other scraping libraries.
The Best Type of Data to Scrape With Selenium
Selenium is a widely used tool for automating web browsers. Some examples of the best types of data to scrape with Selenium include:
- Data loaded via JavaScript: Selenium can scrape websites that use JavaScript to load data dynamically. Here, an example would be content that comes up after the initial page load.
- Data that requires user interaction: Selenium allows you to automate the interaction with a web page, such as clicking buttons, filling out forms, and navigating between pages. This means that you can scrape data that is only accessible by completing an action (like a form submission) with Selenium.
- Data behind a login wall: Selenium allows you to automate the process of logging in to a website, so you won’t have difficulty scraping data that requires a login.
- Data from popups, overlays, and modals: Selenium can interact with elements displayed after a specific action, like a button click. For example, scrapers can gather data displayed in modals, overlays, or popups that require user interaction.
- Data that is not present in the HTML source code: Websites that use techniques such as AJAX to load data or requests to an API that one can only access with a browser can be scraped by Selenium.
Selenium: The Solution to Your Web Scraping Needs
If you only need to extract data from a website, and the website doesn’t require any interactivity, there are other libraries, such as Beautiful Soup and Scrapy, that are more suited for web scraping and are generally easier to use. Otherwise, Selenium is a pretty good option. However, it’s worth noting that web scraping should occur in compliance with the terms of service and the privacy policy of the websites being scraped and also with the local laws.