Using Python and Selenium to Scrape Infinite Scroll Web Pages

Web scraping can be an important tool for data collection. While big social media, such as Twitter and Reddit, supports APIs to quickly extract data using existing python packages, you may sometimes encounter tasks that are difficult to solve using APIs. For instance, the Reddit API allows you to extract posts and comments from subreddits (online communities in Reddit), but it is hard to get posts and comments by keyword search (you will see more clearly what I mean in the next section). Moreover, not every web page has API for web scraping. In these cases, manual web scraping becomes the optimum choice. However, nowadays many web pages implement a web-design technique: infinite scrolling. Infinite scroll web pages automatically expand the content when users scroll down to the bottom of the page, to replace the traditional pagination. While it is very convenient for the users, it adds difficulty to the web scrapping. In this story, I will show the python code I developed to auto-scrolling web pages, and demonstrate how to use it to scrape URLs in Reddit as an example.

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Selenium for infinite scroll web pages: What Is The Problem?

Let’s say that I want to extract the posts and comments about COVID-19 on Reddit for sentiment analysis. I then go to Reddit.com and search “COVID-19”, the resulting page is as follow:

Search Results for COVID-19 on Reddit.com (Before Scrolling)

The texts highlighted in blue boxes are the subreddits. Notice that they are all different. Therefore, if I want to get all these posts through Reddit API, I would have to first get the posts from each subreddit, and write extra code to filter the posts that are related to COVID-19. This is a very complicated process, and thus in this case, manual scraping is favored.

#python #infinite-scroll #web-scraping #selenium

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Using Python and Selenium to Scrape Infinite Scroll Web Pages

Web scraping can be an important tool for data collection. While big social media, such as Twitter and Reddit, supports APIs to quickly extract data using existing python packages, you may sometimes encounter tasks that are difficult to solve using APIs. For instance, the Reddit API allows you to extract posts and comments from subreddits (online communities in Reddit), but it is hard to get posts and comments by keyword search (you will see more clearly what I mean in the next section). Moreover, not every web page has API for web scraping. In these cases, manual web scraping becomes the optimum choice. However, nowadays many web pages implement a web-design technique: infinite scrolling. Infinite scroll web pages automatically expand the content when users scroll down to the bottom of the page, to replace the traditional pagination. While it is very convenient for the users, it adds difficulty to the web scrapping. In this story, I will show the python code I developed to auto-scrolling web pages, and demonstrate how to use it to scrape URLs in Reddit as an example.

---

Selenium for infinite scroll web pages: What Is The Problem?

Let’s say that I want to extract the posts and comments about COVID-19 on Reddit for sentiment analysis. I then go to Reddit.com and search “COVID-19”, the resulting page is as follow:

Search Results for COVID-19 on Reddit.com (Before Scrolling)

The texts highlighted in blue boxes are the subreddits. Notice that they are all different. Therefore, if I want to get all these posts through Reddit API, I would have to first get the posts from each subreddit, and write extra code to filter the posts that are related to COVID-19. This is a very complicated process, and thus in this case, manual scraping is favored.

#python #infinite-scroll #web-scraping #selenium

top 30 Python Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Welcome to my Blog , In this article, you are going to learn the top 10 python tips and tricks.

1) swap two numbers.

2) Reversing a string in Python.

3) Create a single string from all the elements in list.

4) Chaining Of Comparison Operators.

5) Print The File Path Of Imported Modules.

6) Return Multiple Values From Functions.

7) Find The Most Frequent Value In A List.

8) Check The Memory Usage Of An Object.

…

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Web Scraping using Python and Selenium.

Web scraping has been used to extract data from websites almost from the time the World Wide Web was born. In the early days, scraping was mainly done on static pages — those with known elements, tags, and data.

More recently, however, advanced technologies in web development have made the task a bit more difficult. In this article, we’ll explore how we might go about scraping data in the case that new technology and other factors prevent standard scraping.

Traditional Data Scraping

As most websites produce pages meant for human readability rather than automated reading, web scraping mainly consisted of programmatically digesting a web page’s mark-up data (think right-click, View Source), then detecting static patterns in that data that would allow the program to “read” various pieces of information and save it to a file or a database.

Courtesy of the author.

If report data were to be found, often, the data would be accessible by passing either form variables or parameters with the URL. For example:

https://www.myreportdata.com?month=12&year=2004&clientid=24823

Python has become one of the most popular web scraping languages due in part to the various web libraries that have been created for it. One popular library, Beautiful Soup, is designed to pull data out of HTML and XML files by allowing searching, navigating, and modifying tags (i.e., the parse tree).

Browser-based Scraping

Recently, I had a scraping project that seemed pretty straightforward and I was fully prepared to use traditional scraping to handle it. But as I got further into it, I found obstacles that could not be overcome with traditional methods.

Three main issues prevented me from my standard scraping methods:

1. Certificate. There was a certificate required to be installed to access the portion of the website where the data was. When accessing the initial page, a prompt appeared asking me to select the proper certificate of those installed on my computer, and click OK.
2. Iframes. The site used iframes, which messed up my normal scraping. Yes, I could try to find all iframe URLs, then build a sitemap, but that seemed like it could get unwieldy.
3. JavaScript. The data was accessed after filling in a form with parameters (e.g., customer ID, date range, etc.). Normally, I would bypass the form and simply pass the form variables (via URL or as hidden form variables) to the result page and see the results. But in this case, the form contained JavaScript, which didn’t allow me to access the form variables in a normal fashion.

#selenium #crawling #scraping-with-python #python #web-scraping

Beautiful Soup Tutorial - Web Scraping in Python

The Beautiful Soup module is used for web scraping in Python. Learn how to use the Beautiful Soup and Requests modules in this tutorial. After watching, you will be able to start scraping the web on your own.
📺 The video in this post was made by freeCodeCamp.org
The origin of the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Gx3U0BDlo&list=PLWKjhJtqVAbnqBxcdjVGgT3uVR10bzTEB&index=12
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Lambda, Map, Filter functions in python

Welcome to my Blog, In this article, we will learn python lambda function, Map function, and filter function.

Lambda function in python: Lambda is a one line anonymous function and lambda takes any number of arguments but can only have one expression and python lambda syntax is

Syntax: x = lambda arguments : expression

Now i will show you some python lambda function examples:

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