How to check for webpages' popups?

Question

Is there a possibility if I code a program in python that allows to automatically browse a given website using mechanize to detect if there are popup windows (suggesting adv

Answer 1

Unfortunately, Mechanize's browser seems to skip the pop-ups so the title, URL, and HTML are identical for both pop-ups and normal pages.

Frankly, Python is not the right tool for this job and is lagging behind in this respect IMHO. Having spent months doing web crawling, for sites that use Javascript extensively (the number of which is greatly increasing nowadays), I find that using Javascript-Based environments like PhantomJS or SlimerJS are simply better for what you're trying to do.

If you have the luxury to use Javascript-Based environments, I'd say go right ahead. However, you can still use python. PhantomJS embeds Ghost Driver. You can use Ghost.py to utilize the power of PhantomJS. Or you can use Selenium with Python as illustrated here.