I am working on a project which needs to programmatically access and update a .aspx (ASP.NET) page. Specifically, I need to automatically access this page, use several html and JavaScript elements (click checkboxes, enter text in form fields, "click" buttons), and reload the page. Also, during the time the page is accessed, there is information being sent back and forth between the client and server.
What is the most efficient way to go about this? I am most likely thinking about writing something in bash + python to do this but I am not sure it is the best tool for the job.
Thanks
The optimal solution for your problem is using Selenium with python.
The selenium package is used to automate web browser interaction from Python.
pip install -U selenium
You can read the documentation to get familiar with the Selenium Webdriver API.
You cannot edit the pages that are hosted by others, but you can mimic the requests using selenium.
Related
I am thinking of creating a web automation using python, basically it will open browser using selenium webdriver proceeds to click on a few buttons, then using requests post method, fill up a form and then continue to use selenium again. So in short I am asking if we are able to use both selenium and python requests interchangeably?
Of course you can! I use both the libraries interchangeably in the same code file. It is very helpful.
For eg. First I use requests library to fetch the webpage, next I use Selenium whenever I have to change specific parameter in the webpage (like selecting a radio button, inserting form credentials, etc.), and then based on the complexity of the source code, I either use BeautifulSoup, or I continue using Selenium!
I work with python and data mine some content which I categorize into different categories.
Then I go to a specific webpage and submit manually the results.
Is there a way to automate the process? I guess this is a "form-submit" thread but I haven't seen any relevant module in Python. Can you suggest me something?
Selenium Webdriver is the most popular way to drive web pages, but Python also has beautifulsoup; Either library will work.
If you want make this automatic yo have to see which params are send in the form and make a request with this params to the endpoint but directly from your python app, or search a package that simulate a browser and fill the form, but I think that the correct way is making the request directly from your app
I am new to python just started on python web-scraping. I have to scrape data from this realtor site
I need to scrape all the details op read-state agents according to their real-state agency;
For this on the web-browser I have to follow the following instructions
Go to this site
click on agency offices button, enter 4000 pin in search box and then submit.
then we get list of the agencies.
go to our team tab and then we get agents their.
then we have to go to each agents page and record their information.
Can anyone tell me how to approach this. Whats the best way to make this type of scrapers.
Do i have to use selenium for the interaction with the pages.
I have worked on request, BeautifulSoup and simple form submit using mechanize
I would recommend on a searching site that you either use Selenium or Requests with sessions, the advantage of Selenium it it will probably work however it will be slow. For Selenium you should just use the Selenium IDE (Firefox add on) to record what you do then get the HTML from the webpage and use beautifulsoup to parse the data.
If you want to scrape the data quickly and without using much resources I usually use Requests with Sessions. To scrape a website like this you should open up a modern web browser (Firefox, Chrome) and use the network tools for that browser (usually located in developer tools or via right click inspect element). Once you are recording the network you can interact with the webpage to see the connections made to the server. In an example search they may use suggestions e.g
https://suggest.example.com.au/smart-suggest?query=4000&n=7®ions=false
The response then will probably be a JSON of the suggested results. Once you select a suggestion you can just submit a request with that search parameters e.g
https://www.example.com.au/find-agent/agents/petrie-terrace-qld-4000
The URLs for the agents will the be in that HTML page, you just then need to separately send a request to each page to get the information using BeautifulSoup.
You might wanna give Node and Jquery a try. I used to use Python all the time, but it gets messy and hard to maintain after a while.
Using node, you can turn the page HTML into a DOM object and then scrape all the data very easily using Jquery. I have done this for imdb here: “Using JQuery & NodeJS to scrape the web” #asimmittal https://medium.com/#asimmittal/using-jquery-nodejs-to-scrape-the-web-9bb5d439413b
You can modify this to scrape yelp
I want to build a python script to submit some form on internet website. Such as a form to publish automaticaly some item on site like ebay.
Is it possible to do it with BeautifulSoup or this is only to parse some website?
Is it possible to do it with selenium but quickly without open really the browser?
Are there any other ways to do it?
Look at the requests library.. Also, check out the chrome debugger toolbar to see the requests fly by. There is also a utility called postman, where you can "design", queries, then generate code in many different flavors (including pythons requests library).
BeautifulSoup is for parsing HTML.
You can use selenium with PhantomJS to do this without the browser opening. You have to use the Keys portion of selenium to send data to the form to be submitted. It is also worth noting that this method will not work if there are captcha's on the form.
The mechanize library can fill and submit forms.
Hello how can i make changes in my web browser with python? Like filling forms and pressing Submit?
What lib's should i use? And maybe someone of you have some examples?
Using urllib does not make any changes in opened browser for me
Urllib is not intended to do anyting with your browser, but rather to get contents from urls.
To fill in forms and this kind of things, have a look into mechanize, to scrap the webpages, consider using pyquery.
Selenium is great for this. It's a browser automation tool that you can use to launch a browser (any major browser or a 'headless' one), navigate to a url, and interact with the page.
It's used primarily for testing web code against multiple browsers, but is also very useful for 'scraping' pages and automating mundane tasks.
Here are the python docs: http://selenium-python.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html