How To Scrape A JavaScript Website Using Python

Following are some of the dynamic website enhancements that are performed by Javascript.

You can use scraping to collect structured data from websites in an automated fashion. Web scraping is also known as web data extraction. Some of the main use cases of web scraping are as:

Let’s first understand the need to scrape websites.

The businesses use web scraping to make use of the vast amount of publicly available data for making smarter decisions. Below are some of the areas where web scraping is used.

Following are the reasons due to which companies need to scrape the websites.

You can install Selenium using the following command.

pip install selenium

Let us consider a simple selenium example that involves collecting a website title. For this, we will first import webdriver from selenium in a python file as shown below:

from selenium import webdriver

We have to mention the path where the webdriver is located. Afterwards, we have to initialize the Firefox web driver.

WEBDRIVER_PATH = './'
driver = webdriver.Firefox(WEBDRIVER_PATH)

URL = 'https://www.google.com'
driver.get(URL)
print (driver.title)

This is the google page from the firefox web driver. The title printed on the console will be as:

from selenium import webdriver 

WEBDRIVER_PATH = './'
driver = webdriver.Firefox(WEBDRIVER_PATH) 

URL = 'https://www.google.com'
driver.get(URL)
print (driver.title)
driver.quit()

from selenium import webdriver 
 
WEBDRIVER_PATH = './' 
driver = webdriver.Firefox(WEBDRIVER_PATH) 
URL = 'https://www.youtube.com'
driver.get(URL)
print (driver.title)
driver.quit()

from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

After initializing the firefox web driver and getting the Youtube title, we create an object that contains the search box with xpath.

search_box = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//input[@id="search"]')

We then edit the content of the search box and fill it with the word “Selenium”.

search_box.send_keys('Selenium')

search_box.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)

The proxies are required when you need a localized web content. They are also required when you send too many requests to a website in a short period of time. You need proxies for Selenium when automated testing is required. However, in order to use a Selenium proxy for scraping a Javascript website, you need  to use a Selenium wire that extends Selenium’s bindings and gives access to the underlying requests made by the browser.

For using Selenium with a proxy, the following is the package you need to install.

from selenium wire import webdriver

After installing the Python selenium-wire library, you need to mention the following:

Here we mentioned a random port number 8080 as an example. You can set the username, password and URL of the desired website of your own choice.

proxy_username = "USER_NAME"
proxy_password = "PASSWORD"
proxy_url = "Any Website URL"
proxy_port = 8080

options = {
    "proxy": {
        "http": f"http://{proxy_username}:{proxy_password}@{proxy_url}:{proxy_port}",
        "verify_ssl": False,
    },
}

You need to use proxies for scraping a website because of the following reasons:

Web scraping is important as you can use it for:

Hope you got an understanding of how to scrape a Javascript website using Python.