Source code is not complete because "JS is disabled in your browser" - python

I'm writing a python code to, at first, get a full source code of a web page to later scrape it. But when I try to get the source code - I see the aforementioned message ("If you're seeing this message, that means JavaScript has been disabled on your browser, please enable JS to make this app work") with partial html code. Also when I click F12 to see 'elements' the entire code appears meanwhile, pressing Cntrl + U to view the source code yields the same result as getting it with the below mentioned py script
source = requests.get(link).text
soup = BeautifulSoup(source, 'lxml').prettify()
I've seen similar questions to mine but none of them had a satisfactory solution, for example, it was recommended to use selenium to open a new web page and then to work with it, but it would take additional time. JS is enabled in my browser

It is as you have seen on the other answers, you have to use selenium (or another browser automation tool) to enable javascript rendering. The web page you are trying to access uses client side rendering, which means that the first thing it sends when you access the url is a bunch of javascript code. Then the browser executes the javascript code to create the DOM of the web page.
You are saying that javascript is enabled in the browser but that has nothing to do with your python code. The library you are using requests is sending a HTTP GET request to the server to fetch the web page, and the server replies as it would to any other request with the javascript that knows how to render the web page. That's why you need something like selenium, that runs a browser instead of doing a simple HTTP request.

Related

opening a web browser and get url histories in python

I am trying to make a python gui application.
What I want to do is to open a web browser by clicking a button. (Tkinter)
When the web browser is opened, I do login.
After logging it, it will redirect to the page.
And that page url will consist of code as a param I need to use later in code.
I used webbrowser.open_new('') to open a web browser.
But the limitation was it is only for opening.. there was no way to get the final redirected url I need.
Is there a way I can use to open a web browser and do something on that page and finally get that final url?
I am using python.
There are a few main approaches for automating interactions with browsers:
Telling a program how and what to click, like a human would, sometimes using desktop OS automation tools like Applescript
Parse files that contain browser data (will vary browser to browser, here is Firefox)
Use a tool or library that relies on the WebDriver protocol (e.g. selenium, puppeteer)
Access the local SQLite database of the browser and run queries against it
Sounds like 3 is what you need, assuming you're not against bringing in a new dependency.

While webscraping a website in python I don't get the expected response but just a script tag containing a few line of codes

I'm trying to scrape data from a site in python, the payload is right and everything works but when I get the response of the site which would normally be the source code of the html page I instead, get just a script tag with some error written in it. See the response I get enclosed :
b'<script language="JavaScript">\nerr = "";\nlargeur = 1024;\nif (screen.width>largeur) { document.location.href="accueil.php?" +err;\t}\nelse { document.location.href="m.accueil.php?largeur=" +screen.width +\'&\' +err;\t}\n</script>'
Information :
after looking at the site it seems that it uses google analytics, I don't really know about what it is but maybe because of the preview things, it can't load the page since i'm not accessing it by a navigator.
What tool are you using to webscrape? Tools like beautiful soup parse pre-loaded HTML content. If a website uses client-side rendering and JavaScript to load content, often times HTML parsers will not function.
You can instead use an automated browser that interacts with a website just as a regular user would. These automated browsers can operate with or without a GUI. Automated browsers when run without a GUI (also known as a headless browser) take up less time and resources than running them with a GUI. Here's a fairly exhaustive list of headless browsers you can use. Note that not all are compatible with Python.
As Buran mentioned in the comments Selenium is an option. Selenium is very well documented and has a large community following so it's easy to find helpful articles or tutorials. It's a multi-driver so it can run different types of browsers (firefox, chrome, etc.), both headless and with a GUI.

Scrapy for dynamic content

Can we use Scrapy for getting content from a web page which is loaded by Javascript?
I'm trying to scrape usage examples from this page,
but since they are loaded using Javascript as a JSON object I'm not able to get them with Scrapy.
Could you suggest what is the best way to deal with such issues?
Open your browser's developer tools and look at the Network tab. If you hit the "next" button on that page enough, it'll send out a new request:
After removing the JSONP paramter, the URL is pretty straightforward:
https://corpus.vocabulary.com/api/1.0/examples.json?query=unalienable&maxResults=24&startOffset=24&filter=0
By making the minimal number of requests, your spider will be fast.
If you want to just emulate a full browser and execute the JavaScript, you can use something like Selenium or Scrapinghub's Splash (and its corresponding Scrapy plugin).

Scrapy, hash tag on URLs

I'm on the middle of a scrapping project using Scrapy.
I realized that Scrapy strips the URL from a hash tag to the end.
Here's the output from the shell:
[s] request <GET http://www.domain.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=3006339011&ref_=pe_112320_20310580%5C#/ref=sr_nr_p_8_0?rh=n%3A165796011%2Cn%3A%212334086011%2Cn%3A%212334148011%2Cn%3A3006339011%2Cp_8%3A2229010011&bbn=3006339011&ie=UTF8&qid=1309631658&rnid=598357011>
[s] response <200 http://www.domain.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=3006339011&ref_=pe_112320_20310580%5C>
This really affects my scrapping because after a couple of hours trying to find out why some item was not being selected, I realized that the HTML provided by the long URL differs from the one provided by the short one. Besides, after some observation, the content changes in some critical parts.
Is there a way to modify this behavior so Scrapy keeps the whole URL?
Thanks for your feedback and suggestions.
This isn't something scrapy itself can change--the portion following the hash in the url is the fragment identifier which is used by the client (scrapy here, usually a browser) instead of the server.
What probably happens when you fetch the page in a browser is that the page includes some JavaScript that looks at the fragment identifier and loads some additional data via AJAX and updates the page. You'll need to look at what the browser does and see if you can emulate it--developer tools like Firebug or the Chrome or Safari inspector make this easy.
For example, if you navigate to http://twitter.com/also, you are redirected to http://twitter.com/#!/also. The actual URL loaded by the browser here is just http://twitter.com/, but that page then loads data (http://twitter.com/users/show_for_profile.json?screen_name=also) which is used to generate the page, and is, in this case, just JSON data you could parse yourself. You can see this happen using the Network Inspector in Chrome.
Looks like it's not possible. The problem is not the response, it's in the request, which chops the url.
It is retrievable from Javascript - as
window.location.hash. From there you
could send it to the server with Ajax
for example, or encode it and put it
into URLs which can then be passed
through to the server-side.
Can I read the hash portion of the URL on my server-side application (PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.)?
Why do you need this part which is stripped if the server doesn't receive it from browser?
If you are working with Amazon - i haven't seen any problems with such urls.
Actually, when entering that URL in a web browser, it will also only send the part before the hash tag to the web server. If the content is different, it's probably because there are some javascript on the page that - based on the content of the hash tag part - changes the content of the page after it has been loaded (most likely an XmlHttpRequest is made that loads additional content).

web scraping a problem site

I'm trying to scrape some information from a web site, but am having trouble reading the relevant pages. The pages seem to first send a basic setup, then more detailed info. My download attempts only seem to capture the basic setup. I've tried urllib and mechanize so far.
Firefox and Chrome have no trouble displaying the pages, although I can't see the parts I want when I view page source.
A sample url is https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0542&FundIntExt=INT
I'd like, for example, average maturity and average duration from the lower right of the page. The problem isn't extracting that info from the page, it's downloading the page so that I can extract the info.
The page uses JavaScript to load the data. Firefox and Chrome are only working because you have JavaScript enabled - try disabling it and you'll get a mostly empty page.
Python isn't going to be able to do this by itself - your best compromise would be to control a real browser (Internet Explorer is easiest, if you're on Windows) from Python using something like Pamie.
The website loads the data via ajax. Firebug shows the ajax calls. For the given page, the data is loaded from https://personal.vanguard.com/us/JSP/Funds/VGITab/VGIFundOverviewTabContent.jsf?FundIntExt=INT&FundId=0542
See the corresponding javascript code on the original page:
<script>populator = new Populator({parentId:
"profileForm:vanguardFundTabBox:tab0",execOnLoad:true,
populatorUrl:"/us/JSP/Funds/VGITab/VGIFundOverviewTabContent.jsf?FundIntExt=INT&FundId=0542",
inline:fals e,type:"once"});
</script>
The reason why is because it's performing AJAX calls after it loads. You will need to account for searching out those URLs to scrape it's content as well.
As RichieHindle mentioned, your best bet on Windows is to use the WebBrowser class to create an instance of an IE rendering engine and then use that to browse the site.
The class gives you full access to the DOM tree, so you can do whatever you want with it.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.webbrowser(loband).aspx

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