Getting all visible text from a webpage using Selenium

Question

I\'ve been googling this all day with out finding the answer, so apologies in advance if this is already answered.

I\'m trying to get all visible text from a large

Answer 1

Here's a variation on @unutbu's answer:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
from contextlib import closing

import lxml.html as html # pip install 'lxml>=2.3.1'
from lxml.html.clean        import Cleaner
from selenium.webdriver     import Firefox         # pip install selenium
from werkzeug.contrib.cache import FileSystemCache # pip install werkzeug

cache = FileSystemCache('.cachedir', threshold=100000)

url = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else "https://stackoverflow.com/q/7947579"


# get page
page_source = cache.get(url)
if page_source is None:
    # use firefox to get page with javascript generated content
    with closing(Firefox()) as browser:
        browser.get(url)
        page_source = browser.page_source
    cache.set(url, page_source, timeout=60*60*24*7) # week in seconds


# extract text
root = html.document_fromstring(page_source)
# remove flash, images, <script>,<style>, etc
Cleaner(kill_tags=['noscript'], style=True)(root) # lxml >= 2.3.1
print root.text_content() # extract text

I've separated your task in two:

• get page (including elements generated by javascript)
• extract text

The code is connected only through the cache. You can fetch pages in one process and extract text in another process or defer to do it later using a different algorithm.

Answer 2

Using lxml, you might try something like this:

import contextlib
import selenium.webdriver as webdriver
import lxml.html as LH
import lxml.html.clean as clean

url="http://www.yahoo.com"
ignore_tags=('script','noscript','style')
with contextlib.closing(webdriver.Firefox()) as browser:
    browser.get(url) # Load page
    content=browser.page_source
    cleaner=clean.Cleaner()
    content=cleaner.clean_html(content)    
    with open('/tmp/source.html','w') as f:
       f.write(content.encode('utf-8'))
    doc=LH.fromstring(content)
    with open('/tmp/result.txt','w') as f:
        for elt in doc.iterdescendants():
            if elt.tag in ignore_tags: continue
            text=elt.text or ''
            tail=elt.tail or ''
            words=' '.join((text,tail)).strip()
            if words:
                words=words.encode('utf-8')
                f.write(words+'\n') 

This seems to get almost all of the text on www.yahoo.com, except for text in images and some text that changes with time (done with javascript and refresh perhaps).