CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptpythonpython-2.7seleniumweb-scraping
Rob M
Rob M

Reputation: 308

Scraping javascript with Python and Selenium Webdriver

I'm trying to scrape the ads from Ask, which are generated in an iframe by a JS hosted by Google.

When I manually navigate my way through, and view source, there they are (I'm specifically looking for a div with the id "adBlock", which is in an iframe).

But when I try using Firefox, Chromedriver or FirefoxPortable, the source returned to me is missing all of the elements I'm looking for.

I tried scraping with urllib2 and had the same results, even when adding in the necessary headers. I thought for sure that a physical browser instance like Webdriver creates would have fixed that problem.

Here's the code I'm working off of, which had to be cobbled together from a few different sources:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
import pprint

# Create a new instance of the Firefox driver
driver = webdriver.Chrome('C:\Python27\Chromedriver\chromedriver.exe')
driver.get("http://www.ask.com")

print driver.title
inputElement = driver.find_element_by_name("q")

# type in the search
inputElement.send_keys("baseball hats")
# submit the form (although google automatically searches now without submitting)
inputElement.submit()

try:
    WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.title_contains("baseball"))
    print driver.title
    output = driver.page_source
    print(output)
finally:
    driver.quit()

I know I circle through a few different attempts at viewing the source, that's not what I'm concerned about.

Any thoughts as to why I'm getting one result from this script (ads omitted) and a totally different result (ads present) from the browser it opened in? I've tried Scrapy, Selenium, Urllib2, etc. No joy.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2612

Answers (1)

Richard
Richard

Reputation: 9029

Selenium only displays the contents of the current frame or iframe. You'll have to switch into the iframes using something along these lines

iframes = driver.find_elements_by_tag_name("iframe")

for iframe in iframes
    driver.switch_to_default_content()
    driver.switch_to_frame(iframe)

    output = driver.page_source
    print(output)

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions