Dynamic Data Web Scraping with Python, BeautifulSoup

Question

I am trying to extract this data(number) for many pages from the HTML. The data is different for each page. When I try to use soup.select(\'span[class=\"pull-right\"]\') it

Answer 1

The javascript code won't get executed if you retrieve page with the requests.get. So the selenium shall be used instead. It will mimic user like behaviour with the opening of the page in browser, so the js code will be executed.

To start with selenium, you need to install with pip install selenium. Then to retrieve your item use code below:

from selenium import webdriver

browser = webdriver.Firefox()
# List of the page url and selector of element to retrieve.
wiki_pages = [("https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-20&pages=Star_Wars:_The_Last_Jedi",
               ".summary-column--container .legend-block--pageviews .linear-legend--counts:first-child span.pull-right"),]
for wiki_page in wiki_pages:
    url = wiki_page[0]
    selector = wiki_page[1]
    browser.get(wiki_page)
    page_views_count = browser.find_element_by_css_selector(selector)
    print page_views_count.text
browser.quit()

NOTE: If you need to run headless browser, consider using PyVirtualDisplay (a wrapper for Xvfb) to run headless WebDriver tests, see 'How do I run Selenium in Xvfb?' for more information.

Answer 2

You should try using the python plugin selenium. It requires you to download a driver for whatever browser you are using. You will then be able to use selenium to pull out values from the html

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-20&pages=Star_Wars:_The_Last_Jedi")
element = driver.find_element_by_class_name("pull-right")
// or the following below 
//element = driver.find_element_by_name("q")
//element = driver.find_element_by_id("html ID name")
//element = driver.find_element_by_name("html element name")
//element = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@id='passwd-id']")
print(element)
driver.close()