CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonseleniumselenium-webdriverphantomjs
cbp2
cbp2

Reputation: 245

PhantomJS returning empty web page (python, Selenium)

Trying to screen scrape a web site without having to launch an actual browser instance in a python script (using Selenium). I can do this with Chrome or Firefox - I've tried it and it works - but I want to use PhantomJS so it's headless.

The code looks like this:

import sys
import traceback
import time

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.desired_capabilities import DesiredCapabilities

dcap = dict(DesiredCapabilities.PHANTOMJS)
dcap["phantomjs.page.settings.userAgent"] = (
    "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/53 "
    "(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.87"
)

try:
    # Choose our browser
    browser = webdriver.PhantomJS(desired_capabilities=dcap)
    #browser = webdriver.PhantomJS()
    #browser = webdriver.Firefox()
    #browser = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="/usr/local/bin/chromedriver")

    # Go to the login page
    browser.get("https://www.whatever.com")

    # For debug, see what we got back
    html_source = browser.page_source
    with open('out.html', 'w') as f:
        f.write(html_source)

    # PROCESS THE PAGE (code removed)

except Exception, e:
    browser.save_screenshot('screenshot.png')
    traceback.print_exc(file=sys.stdout)

finally:
    browser.close()

The output is merely:

<html><head></head><body></body></html>

But when I use the Chrome or Firefox options, it works fine. I thought maybe the web site was returning junk based on the user agent, so I tried faking that out. No difference.

What am I missing?

UPDATED: I will try to keep the below snippet updated with until it works. What's below is what I'm currently trying.

import sys
import traceback
import time
import re

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.support.wait import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.desired_capabilities import DesiredCapabilities
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

dcap = dict(DesiredCapabilities.PHANTOMJS)
dcap["phantomjs.page.settings.userAgent"] = (
    "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/53 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.87")

try:
    # Set up our browser
    browser = webdriver.PhantomJS(desired_capabilities=dcap, service_args=['--ignore-ssl-errors=true'])
    #browser = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="/usr/local/bin/chromedriver")

    # Go to the login page
    print "getting web page..."
    browser.get("https://www.website.com")

    # Need to wait for the page to load
    timeout = 10
    print "waiting %s seconds..." % timeout
    wait = WebDriverWait(browser, timeout)
    element = wait.until(EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID,'the_id')))
    print "done waiting. Response:"

    # Rest of code snipped. Fails as "wait" above.

Upvotes: 19

Views: 16586

Answers (3)

Arjun Lal
Arjun Lal

Reputation: 1

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS(service_args=['--ignore-ssl-errors=true', '--ssl-protocol=TLSv1'])

This worked for me

Upvotes: 0

Raunaq Kochar
Raunaq Kochar

Reputation: 1084

I was facing the same problem and no amount of code to make the driver wait was helping.
The problem is the SSL encryption on the https websites, ignoring them will do the trick.

Call the PhantomJS driver as:

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS(service_args=['--ignore-ssl-errors=true', '--ssl-protocol=TLSv1'])

This solved the problem for me.

Upvotes: 30

alecxe
alecxe

Reputation: 473863

You need to wait for the page to load. Usually, it is done by using an Explicit Wait to wait for a key element to be present or visible on a page. For instance:

from selenium.webdriver.support.wait import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC


# ...
browser.get("https://www.whatever.com")

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div.content")))

html_source = browser.page_source
# ...

Here, we'll wait up to 10 seconds for a div element with class="content" to become visible before getting the page source.

Additionally, you may need to ignore SSL errors:

browser = webdriver.PhantomJS(desired_capabilities=dcap, service_args=['--ignore-ssl-errors=true'])

Though, I'm pretty sure this is related to the redirecting issues in PhantomJS. There is an open ticket in phantomjs bugtracker:

Upvotes: 4

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