I have been trying for hours to figure this out. From a building tutorial to just trying to find prebuilt ones, I can’t seem to make it click.
For context I am trying to scrape books myself that I can’t seem to find elsewhere so I can use and post them for others.
The scraper tutorial
Hackernoon tutorial by Ethan Jarell
I initially tried to follow this but I kept having a “couldn’t find module” error. Since I have never touched python prior to this, I am unaware how to fix this and the help links are not exactly helpful. If there’s someone who could guide me through this tutorial that would be great.
Selenium
I don’t really get what this is but I think its some sort of python pack and it tells me to download using the pip command but that doesn’t seem to work (syntax error). I don’t know how to manually add it in because, again, I have little idea of what I’m doing.
Scrapy
This one seemed like it’d be an out-of-box deal but not only does it need the pip command to download but it has like 5 other dependencies it needs to function which complicates it more for me.
I am not criticizing these wares, I am just asking for help and if someone could help with the simplification of it all or maybe even point me to an easier method that would be amazing!
Updates
- Figured out that I am supposed to run the command for pip in the command prompt thing on my computer, not the python runner.
py -mfollowed by the pip request
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Got the Ethan Jarrell tutorial to work and managed to add in selenium, which made me realize that selenium isn’t really helpful with the project. rip xP
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Spent a bunch of time trying to workshop the basic scraper to work with dynamic sites, unsuccessful
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Online self-help doesn’t go in as much as I would like, probably due to the legal grey area
Selenium is really more of a testing framework for frontend developers, and could theoretically be used for scraping, but that would be somewhat like buying a car based on the paint and not looking in detail under the hood.
I can’t say I’ve ever worked with scrappy, but the tool I would use for web scraping with Python is BeautifulSoup. This tutorial seems decent enough, but you will need to understand basic web concepts like IDs, classes, tags, and tag attributes to get the most out of the tutorial: https://geekpython.medium.com/web-scraping-in-python-using-beautifulsoup-3207c038723b
W3Schools will also be your friend if you have questions about HTML/CSS selectors in general: https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
Understanding regular expressions and/or xpath would also be very helpful, but are probably best considered to be extra credit in most cases.
I’ll try to respond if you have any issues or questions, but hopefully that gives you enough to get started.
My current script uses bs4 and request imports. It also has the selenium import for geckodrive but I am considering just removing that feature lol
I would love to see your code, but I understand if this forum isn’t the most ideal place to share.
I could send it to you privately if you let me know ur discord or something
The reason to use Selenium is if the website you want to scrape uses javascript in a way that inhibits getting content without a full browser environment. BeautifulSoup is just a parser, it can’t solve that problem.
In my experience, this scenario typically means that there is some sort of API (very likely undocumented) that is being used on the backend. That requires a bit more investigation and testing with browser developer tools, the JS Console, and often trial and error. But once you overcome that (admittedly very complex and technical) hurdle, you can almost always get away with just using the requests library at that point.
I’ve had to do that kind of thing more times than I’d like to admit, but the juice is almost always worth the squeeze.
This was the original plan but it doesn’t work as well for this on ‘dynamic’ websites
IIRC it should be able to be made to work since it does everything a browser does, found this search result, though it has been a while since I used it myself at all. Another thing you might try that has worked for me is iMacros, that’s a little simpler and more basic than Selenium but should work for what you say you want to do.
I test with IDLE for python + use selenium for driver directory (geckodrive)
I’m an automation engineer. For scripting with with python and selenium what’s the issue
I’m attempting to make a webscraper that can grab online books that are stored within the site or stored with a direct link to the storage site. I don’t want to reinvent this but finding one that I can work and/or build off of is hard due to my lack of experience and vague resources.
It needs a driver and the web-browser to be executed in headless mode. For Chrome that’s chrome-driver. You can get it here.
To make a script for it, I recommend talking to a LLM. I have asked it to build scrapers before, so it does the job.
If you want a practical use of Selenium being demonstrated, you can see it in LucidWebSearch plugin for Oobabooga.
I recommend talking to a LLM
Any recommendations? Not chat-GPT
Also thanks for the help so far!
Gemini, Perplexity, Poe. Creating a Selenium script isn’t that hard for them. You can try running your own, but it’s more less likely that it will produce good results. Best coder LLM I’ve seen out there for hosting is Yi Coder 9B.
Claude is really good: https://claude.ai/
There is no simplification that you’re looking for. It seems you don’t have a programing background. If you really need to scrape something, you need to learn a programing language, HTTP, HTML, and maybe javascript. AFAIK, there is no easy way or point and click scrapper building tool. You will need to invest time and learn. Don’t worry, you should be able to get it done in 2-3 months if you do invest your time in.
I don’t want a point and click scraper, just a guide that isn’t assuming I have background + simple mans terms for easier reading. Thanks for believing in me to be able to build the basic skills necessary! Much appreciated :3
I don’t a single guide for you but I can layout a road map.
- A programming language. I prefer Python.
- Basic HTML syntax and CSS selectors
- HTTP, specifically methods, status code (no need to memorize all cuz you can go look it up), and cookies
After you got those foundation ready, you can go on and try to build a webscraper. I advice aginst using Scrapy. Not because it is bad but too overwhelming and abstracted for any beginner. I will instead advice you use
requestsfor HTTP, and BeautifulSoup4 for HTML parsing. You will build a more solid foundation and transition to scrapy later when you need those advanced function.When you get stuck, don’t afraid to pause on your attempt and read tutorials again. Head to the Python Community on Discord to get interactive help. We welcome noobs as we once were noobs too. Just don’t ever mention scraping there as they can’t help if they suspect you’re trying to do something inappropriate, malicious, or illegal. They are notoriously aginst
yt-dlpwhich frustrates me a bit. Phrase it nicely and in an generic way. I will be there occasionally offering help.The discord thing is a no-go since I don’t really know how to make my issue palatable. That’s why I used lemmy. Thanks again!
I am no expert, but I have used Python in a professional environment, and helped on board a Python newbie to build out his first project.
It would be helpful to know what your environment looks like (what OS you are running, Python version, terminal interface – are you running cmd, powershell, terminal) and which steps prompts the reported error messages.
Starting from the first time running Python using a Windows computer, the first steps should be
Launch Powershell as admin and type in the following commands: set-executionpolicy remotesigned winget install python mkdir python cd python python -m venv scraper .\scraper\Scripts\activate
Following that you should be able to use
pipto install more modules or packages. I have Visual Studio Code as my IDE, and that means from there I can also runcodeto open the text editor to write whatever code I intend to run. Be sure to save it to C:\Users\youruseraccount\python If your scripts are saved to that folder, you can run them from powershell by just typing in their filename. Any time you run scripts, open powershell and typecd pythonand then.\scraper\Scripts\activateHit enter, then type in the name of the script you want to run.This information dump is not the most detailed, but it should get you to the point that you can run your scripts.
I am having to frankinscript because resources don’t really give out the code for my needs. I am using command prompt from win powershell and testing with python IDLE
Selenium is a “driver” that controls browsers, you would need some type of software to actually drive it. If you have programming experience it’s pretty easy to get going.
Personally, I use it in Ruby on Rails development for unit testing but I also use it to log in to websites and perform some actions on behalf of a user (where the websites don’t offer an API).
I don’t have experience with the others, but thought my comment may or may not be useful.
I don’t have programming experience and what sorts of software can “drive” the driver?
You’re going to want to do a lot more reading ahead of time then. It’s not hard, but you really need to know some basics about javascript before you start.
I probably can’t be of much help yet unless for some reason you want to take up programming. I’m just not familiar with web scraping outside programming.
I wouldn’t mind taking it up if I could just focus on what i’m interested in working on. Python seems simple enough after spending 9 hours trying to get this to work lol. I don’t want to “reinvent the wheel” as much as I just want to be able to understand and work with tools that already exist.
We use node.js with puppeteer for some of our web crawling at work. It’s pretty straightforward once you have a basic script to launch it. If you havent already I’d highly suggest installing vs code. You install node.js, then using npm (node package manager) install puppeteer and whatever other dependencies you might have. Someone out there probably has a basic js file out there that will open chrome, or just ask an LLM (I just use ChatGPT, they’re all the same shit). From there you just need to navigate to your pages, then use a queryselector and .click() to click on your elements. It’s all javascript from there.
Pro tip: write your queryselectors in your browser using the inspect element/console tab, then put it in your JS file. Nothing is worse than being 10 minutes into a crawl and you’ve got a queerselector.
I don’t like to touch js so ive being going python only. (besides basic html & Css) but I found puppeteer and didn’t really get it.
Ask dr gpt
