I am looking to embed(stream) a web browser running from my vps on a webpage. I'm just wondering what the best way to do that would be. preferably using a python framework, But I'm just not sure where to start. I'm open to any suggestions, thanks!
What you're looking for is likely a python proxy server. Fortunately other people have also been interested in such a thing. Take a look at this stack overflow article, as it has a number of suggestions on simple python based proxies you may want to try.
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What even am I doing
So, as Minecraft Java has been slowly switching over to using Microsoft based accounts instead of solely Mojang accounts, I have been trying to put together an authentication method for a small launcher project I've been working on.
The First Issue.
I've been following a piece of documentation here, which had instructions on what GET and POST requests to send to which URLs, and how to parse them, etc. It's worked pretty well, except for The First Issue.
It was a dark and stormy night, and the Microsoft Authentication URL used Javascript for redirects, so the Requests library I was using in Python could not follow the redirects. There might be a way to parse the HTML content and find the redirections or something, but that is way above my head, because I am still new to even Python.
So I looked around for a solution that would let me follow the JavaScript redirects, and the best solution (in concept) looked to be using a headless browser. This led me down a long path until I came face to face with The Second Issue.
The Second Issue.
I looked around for a headless browser that I could use, and I found a couple:
Selenium, or
PyQT WebEngine or WebKit
(I know there are lots of others but I chose these and used them for examples)
From here, the issue isn't so much an issue to fix, but the issue of I don't know what I'm doing.
I looked into Selenium, and it looked promising, but the fact that I had to download a WebDriver confused me in terms of how I would package that, since this is going to be used for a distributed application.
I then looked into PyQT WebEngine, and it just confused me in all respects, so basically I just need some info on maybe how to use it. I also don't need to have to use PyQT to launch a window, or design my UI, or anything else. I already am planning to use Kivy for the GUI. I just need a headless browser or some other solution to follow Javascript redirects when sending a POST request to a certain URL.
So,
From here I just want to ask advice on which route I should take, since there seems to be a broad amount of options I could use. I've already mentioned what I need, so any advice on how or what I should use, in terms of headless browsers, libraries, etc.
Also if anyone has any other suggestions for how to authenticate a Microsoft account, please let me know.
I'm almost done
If there is anything I could answer or clarify, just let me know. I will highly appreciate all advice or suggestions.
Thanks,
Pyrotex7
Well to resolve this - I just went with PyQt in the end after messing around for a while.
This question already has answers here:
Web-scraping JavaScript page with Python
(18 answers)
Closed 4 hours ago.
What is the best method to scrape a dynamic website where most of the content is generated by what appears to be ajax requests? I have previous experience with a Mechanize, BeautifulSoup, and python combo, but I am up for something new.
--Edit--
For more detail: I'm trying to scrape the CNN primary database. There is a wealth of information there, but there doesn't appear to be an api.
The best solution that I found was to use Firebug to monitor XmlHttpRequests, and then to use a script to resend them.
This is a difficult problem because you either have to reverse engineer the JavaScript on a per-site basis, or implement a JavaScript engine and run the scripts (which has its own difficulties and pitfalls).
It's a heavy weight solution, but I've seen people doing this with GreaseMonkey scripts - allow Firefox to render everything and run the JavaScript, and then scrape the elements. You can even initiate user actions on the page if needed.
Selenium IDE, a tool for testing, is something I've used for a lot of screen-scraping. There are a few things it doesn't handle well (Javascript window.alert() and popup windows in general), but it does its work on a page by actually triggering the click events and typing into the text boxes. Because the IDE portion runs in Firefox, you don't have to do all of the management of sessions, etc. as Firefox takes care of it. The IDE records and plays tests back.
It also exports C#, PHP, Java, etc. code to build compiled tests/scrapers that are executed on the Selenium server. I've done that for more than a few of my Selenium scripts, which makes things like storing the scraped data in a database much easier.
Scripts are fairly simple to write and alter, being made up of things like ("clickAndWait","submitButton"). Worth a look given what you're describing.
Adam Davis's advice is solid.
I would additionally suggest that you try to "reverse-engineer" what the JavaScript is doing, and instead of trying to scrape the page, you issue the HTTP requests that the JavaScript is issuing and interpret the results yourself (most likely in JSON format, nice and easy to parse). This strategy could be anything from trivial to a total nightmare, depending on the complexity of the JavaScript.
The best possibility, of course, would be to convince the website's maintainers to implement a developer-friendly API. All the cool kids are doing it these days 8-) Of course, they might not want their data scraped in an automated fashion... in which case you can expect a cat-and-mouse game of making their page increasingly difficult to scrape :-(
There is a bit of a learning curve, but tools like Pamie (Python) or Watir (Ruby) will let you latch into the IE web browser and get at the elements. This turns out to be easier than Mechanize and other HTTP level tools since you don't have to emulate the browser, you just ask the browser for the html elements. And it's going to be way easier than reverse engineering the Javascript/Ajax calls. If needed you can also use tools like beatiful soup in conjunction with Pamie.
Probably the easiest way is to use IE webbrowser control in C# (or any other language). You have access to all the stuff inside browser out of the box + you dont need to care about cookies, SSL and so on.
i found the IE Webbrowser control have all kinds of quirks and workarounds that would justify some high quality software to take care of all those inconsistencies, layered around the shvwdoc.dll api and mshtml and provide a framework.
This seems like it's a pretty common problem. I wonder why someone hasn't anyone developed a programmatic browser? I'm envisioning a Firefox you can call from the command line with a URL as an argument and it will load the page, run all of the initial page load JS events and save the resulting file.
I mean Firefox, and other browsers already do this, why can't we simply strip off the UI stuff?
I have been wondering about this since I could really benefit from a program that makes actions on websites that I use for my job that require the same command over and over again.
I know some python and I love to learn new things.
I tried looking for it on google but I guess I'm not sure how to find it.
I would love it if you could direct me to a guide or something like that.
Thank you very much!
Selenium interacts with a web browser directly, although you can hide the browser window in the code (look up Selenium in --headless mode). This is a good choice for filling out a lot of forms or interacting with graphical user interface elements.
However, if you need to request information from websites, you don't always need to interact with the web browser directly. You can use the package called Requests. This doesn't depend on any web browsers and can run silently in the background.
I think you can do it with Python and some packages like selenium. Also you need some html knowledge to search in the html source code of the specific wegpage.
I found an interesting use case, maybe that helps you:
https://towardsdatascience.com/controlling-the-web-with-python-6fceb22c5f08
I want to write a program that searches through a fairly large website and extracts certain things. I've had a couple online Python courses, but neither said anything about how to access the internet with Python. I have no idea where I ought to start with this.
You have first to read about the standard python library urllib2.
Once you are comfortable with the basic ideas behind this lib you can try requests which is much easier to interact with the web especially APIs. I suggest using it in parallel with httpie to test out queries quick and dirty from command line.
If you go a little further building a librairy or an engine to crawl the web you will need some sort of asynchronous programming, I recommend starting with Gevent
Finally, if you want to create a crawler/bot you can take a look at Scrapy. You should however start with basic libraries before diving into this one as it can get quite complex
It sounds like you want a web crawler/scraper. What sorts of things do you want to pull? Images? Links? Just the job for a web crawler/scraper.
Start there, there should be lots of articles on Stackoverflow that will help you implement details such as connecting to the internet (getting a web response).
See this article.
There is much more in the internet than just websites, but I assume that you just want to crawl some html pages and extract data from them. You have many many options to solve that problem. Just some starting points:
urllib2 from the standard library
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/requests (much easier and more user friendly)
http://scrapy.org/ (a very good crawling framework)
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ (library to extract data from html)
this is a complete n00b question and i understand i may get voted down for asking this but i am totally confused over python's html integration.
as i understand one way to integrate python with html code is by using mod_python.
now, is there any other way or method that is more effective for using python with html?
please advise me on this as i am new to learning python and could use some help.
some pointers to code samples would be highly appreciated.
thanks a lot.
EDIT: also what i would like to know is, how does PyHP and mod_python compare with regards to each other. i mean how are they different? and Django? what is Django all about?
I would suggest you to start with web.py
You can read a tutorial on how to use Python in the web.
http://docs.python.org/howto/webservers.html
In few words, mod_python keeps python interpreter in memory ready to execute python scripts, which is faster than launching it every time. It doesn't let you integrate python in html like PHP. For this you need to use a special application, like PyHP (http://www.pyhp.org) or another (there are several of them). Read Python tutorial and documentation pages, there's plenty of info and links to many template and html-embedding engines.
Such engines as PyHP require some overhead to run. Without them, your python application must output HTTP response headers and the page as strings. Mod_wsgi and fastcgi facilitate this process. The page I linked in the beginning gives a good overview on that.
Also you may try Tornado, a python web server, if you don't need to stick to Apache.
The standard way for Python web apps to talk to a webserver is WSGI. Also check out WebOb.
http://www.wsgi.org/wsgi/
http://pythonpaste.org/webob/
But for a complete noob I'd start with a complete web-framework (in which case you typically can ignore the links above). Django or Grok are both full-stack framworks that are easy to use and learn. Django is more popular, but Grok is built on 13 years of Web application publishing experience, and is seriously cool. The difference is a matter of taste.
http://django.org/
http://grok.zope.org/
If you want something more minimalistic, the worlds your oyster, there are an infinite amount of web frameworks for Python, from BFG to Turbogears.