How Can Python Scrape Dynamic Website Content?

<p>

<p>Dynamic Content Scrapping with Python

<p>Obtaining plain text from static HTML is straightforward, but dynamic content is a different story. JavaScript embeds content that is not immediately accessible to Python's HTTP request libraries like urllib2.

<p>Accessing Dynamic Content

<p>To access dynamic content, Python can leverage external tools that simulate web browsers. These tools execute JavaScript and return the rendered page content.

<p>1. Selenium with PhantomJS:

• Install PhantomJS (headless browser) and ensure it's in your path.
• Use Selenium's Python library to instantiate PhantomJS as a web driver.
• Navigate to the target page and locate the elements of interest.

<p>2. dryscape (Python 2 only):

• Install dryscrape using pip.
• Open a dryscrape session and visit the target page.
• Retrieve the rendered page content as a string.

<p>Example

<p>Consider the sample HTML page with dynamic JavaScript:

<p>

<p>Without JS support:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

response = requests.get(my_url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text)
print(soup.find(id="intro-text"))

<p>Output:

<p>

<p>With JS support (Selenium):

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()
driver.get(my_url)
print(driver.find_element_by_id("intro-text").text)

<p>Output:

Yay! Supports javascript

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