You can replace ‘URL_Link’ with the link of the web page you are trying to scrape. PATH = "C:\Program Files (x86)\chromedriver.exe" driver = webdriver.Chrome(PATH)Īnd lastly, you use the driver to open up and manipulate the web page you want to scrape. If you have extracted the Webdriver in the same location as I above, you can just copy the code. Next, we’ll need to set the PATH for the Webdriver so that Selenium can use the Webdriver. from selenium import webdriver from import Keys from import By from import WebDriverWait from import expected_conditions as EC from import TimeoutException You can copy these code into your python file. We’ll need to start the code with some boilerplate code and import some of the tools we’ll use from the Selenium package. We’re ready to move on to step 2 and writing the code for our web scraper. There is no installation involved, but you will need to extract the file and put it in a known folder such as: C:\Program Files (x86)\chromedriver.exeĪnd that’s it for the files we need to install. You will have to download other webdriver such as Firefox if you use Firefox as your default browser. We also have to download Chromedriver (if you are using Chrome). You should see this upon a successful install of pip The installation is self-explanatory, but it is important for you to add Python to PATH during installation so that you may call the program easily, and you don’t have to deal with PATH issues. I will recommend downloading the latest 3.7.x version (3.7.7) of Python instead of 3.8.x, as there are some packages which has yet to be updated for the 3.8.x version and thus becomes a source of issues. You can do that simply by heading to the Python website here and download and install it on your computer. To use Selenium, you will need to install Python on your computer first. This step is for you, otherwise, please feel free to skip ahead to the relevant parts for you. If you have never used python or pip before. There are 3 generic steps to building your web scraper with Selenium, and I’ve broken them down below: 1. This is the reason why Selenium is much slower than BeautifulSoup and Scrapy (it needs to render all the HTML/CSS/JS code on a website rather than just extracting data directly from the servers) but it also allows us to get past some of the website’s block against web scraping tools (since we’re accessing the websites like a normal user). Thus, when you use Selenium, you will see Selenium opening up a normal Browser on your screen to carry out the programmed actions. And as it turns out, when you have that ability, you can use it to automate the extraction of HTML DOM element data (aka web scraping). In short, Selenium is a browser which you can program.
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