Scraping websites with Javascript enabled?

Question

I\'m trying to scrape and submit information to websites that heavily rely on Javascript to do most of its actions. The website won\'t even work when i disable Javascript in

Answer 1

I wrote a small tutorial on this subject, this might help:

http://koaning.io.s3-website.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/dynamic-scraping-with-python.html

Basically what you do is you have the selenium library pretend that it is a firefox browser, the browser will wait until all javascript has loaded before it continues passing you the html string. Once you have this string, you can then parse it with beautifulsoup.

Answer 2

Check out crowbar. I haven't had any experience with it, but I was curious about the answer to your question so I started googling around. I'd like to know if this works out for you.

http://grep.codeconsult.ch/2007/02/24/crowbar-scrape-javascript-generated-pages-via-gecko-and-rest/

Answer 3

I would actually suggest using Selenium. Its mainly designed for testing Web-Applications from a "user perspective however it is basically a "FireFox" driver. I've actually used it for this purpose ... although I was scapping an dynamic AJAX webpage. As long as the Javascript form has a recognizable "Anchor Text" that Selenium can "click" everything should sort itself out.

Hope that helps

Answer 4

I've had exactly the same problem. It is not simple at all, but I finally found a great solution, using PyQt4.QtWebKit.

You will find the explanations on this webpage : http://blog.motane.lu/2009/07/07/downloading-a-pages-content-with-python-and-webkit/

I've tested it, I currently use it, and that's great !

Its great advantage is that it can run on a server, only using X, without a graphic environment.

Answer 5

You should look into using Ghost, a Python library that wraps the PyQt4 + WebKit hack.

This makes g the WebKit client:

import ghost
g = ghost.Ghost()

You can grab a page with g.open(url) and then g.content will evaluate to the document in its current state.

Ghost has other cool features, like injecting JS and some form filling methods, and you can pass the resulting document to BeautifulSoup and so on: soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(g.content).

So far, Ghost is the only thing I've found that makes this kind of thing easy in Python. The only limitation I've come across is that you can't easily create more than one instance of the client object, ghost.Ghost, but you could work around that.

Answer 6

Maybe you could use Selenium Webdriver, which has python bindings I believe. I think it's mainly used as a tool for testing websites, but I guess it should be usable for scraping too.