CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonhtmlparsingweb-crawler
K L
K L

Reputation: 1371

Parsing from a website -- source code does not contain the info I need

I'm a little new to web crawlers and such, though I've been programming for a year already. So please bear with me as I try to explain my problem here.

I'm parsing info from Yahoo! News, and I've managed to get most of what I want, but there's a little portion that has stumped me.

For example: http://news.yahoo.com/record-nm-blaze-test-forest-management-225730172.html

I want to get the numbers beside the thumbs up and thumbs down icons in the comments. When I use "Inspect Element" in my Chrome browser, I can clearly see the things that I have to look for - namely, an em tag under the div class 'ugccmt-rate'. However, I'm not able to find this in my python program. In trying to track down the root of the problem, I clicked to view source of the page, and it seems that this tag is not there. Do you guys know how I should approach this problem? Does this have something to do with the javascript on the page that displays the info only after it runs? I'd appreciate some pointers in the right direction.

Thanks.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 435

Answers (2)

kindall
kindall

Reputation: 184191

Using the Web Console in Firefox you can pretty easily see what requests the page is actually making as it runs its scripts, and figure out what URI returns the data you want. Then you can request that URI directly in your Python script and tease the data out of it. It is probably in a format that Python already has a library to parse, such as JSON.

Yahoo! may have some stuff on their server side to try to prevent you from accessing these data files in a script, such as checking the browser (user-agent header), cookies, or referrer. These can all be faked with enough perseverance, but you should take their existence as a sign that you should tread lightly. (They may also limit the number of requests you can make in a given time period, which is impossible to get around.)

Upvotes: 1

Blender
Blender

Reputation: 298176

The page is being generated via JavaScript.

Check if there is a mobile version of the website first. If not, check for any APIs or RSS/Atom feeds. If there's nothing else, you'll either have to manually figure out what the JavaScript is loading and from where, or use Selenium to automate a browser that renders the JavaScript for you for parsing.

Upvotes: 2

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