Python, Selenium, and Beautiful Soup for URL

Question

I am trying to write a script using Selenium to access pastebin do a search and print out in text the URL results. I need the visible URL results and nothing else.

Answer 1

You don't actually need BeautifulSoup. selenium itself is very powerful at locating element:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys


browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('http://www.pastebin.com')

search = browser.find_element_by_name('q')
search.send_keys("test")
search.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

# wait for results to appear
wait = WebDriverWait(browser, 10)
results = wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div.gsc-resultsbox-visible")))

# grab results
for link in results.find_elements_by_css_selector("a.gs-title"):
    print link.get_attribute("href")

browser.close()

Prints:

http://pastebin.com/VYQTSbzY
http://pastebin.com/VYQTSbzY
http://pastebin.com/VAAQCjkj
...
http://pastebin.com/fVUejyRK
http://pastebin.com/fVUejyRK

Note the use of an Explicit Wait which helps to wait for the search results to appear.