Web Scraping with Selenium: A Comprehensive Guide

Let's scrape..!!

Selenium is a powerful tool that can be used to automate web browsers and perform a variety of testing tasks. However, it can also be used for web scraping, which involves extracting data from web pages. In this article, we will explore how Selenium can be used for web scraping with Python.

What is Web Scrapping?

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from web pages. It involves using a tool or a script to automate the process of extracting data from a website. Web scraping can be useful for a variety of applications, including data mining, market research, and content analysis. Selenium can be used for web scraping by automating web browser interactions and extracting data from web pages.

Installation of Requirements

Selenium

The first step in using Selenium for web scraping is to install the Selenium library. You can install Selenium using pip, which is a package manager for Python. Open your command prompt or terminal and type the following command:

pip install selenium

Web driver

Selenium works by automating web browser interactions. However, it needs a web driver to interact with the web browser. There are several web drivers available for different web browsers. You need to install the appropriate web driver for the web browser you want to use.

For example, if you want to use Google Chrome as your web browser, you must install ChromeDriver. You can download the ChromeDriver from the official website and install it on your computer.

from selenium import webdriver
chrome_driver_path = '/path/to/chromedriver'
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_driver_path)
driver.get('https://www.google.com')

You could either download the driver and use it with the help of its location in which it is saved or else you can also program it in such a way that it downloads the driver each time the program is run.

from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install())

Let's Scrape

Once you have installed the Selenium library and the web driver, you can launch the web browser using Selenium. You can do this by creating an instance of the web driver and passing it to the Selenium library.

XPath is a syntax for defining parts of an XML document. All the elements in a web page will have a unique Xpath. This Xpath can you used to select the specific parts of the page which carry the data that we need.

We can get the xpath of an element by

• Go to the web page that needs to be scrapped.
• Right-click and select Inspect
• Select the pointer icon on top and select the data to be scrapped.
• You can see the corresponding element on the left.
• Right-click on that specific element click on copy and select copy Xpath.
• The specific data can be scrapped by:

variable = driver.findElement(By.xpath("copied Xpath")) 

Example program:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

driver = webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install())

driver.get('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi')

val = driver.find_element(By.XPATH,'//*[@id="mw-content-text"]/div[1]/table/tbody/tr[1]/th/div[2]')
print(val.text)

Conclusion

Selenium can be a powerful tool for web scraping, as it provides a way to automate web browser interactions and extract data from web pages. Using Selenium for web scraping requires installing the Selenium library, installing a web driver for your web browser, launching the web browser using Selenium, and using the various methods provided by the Selenium library to extract data from web pages.

However, it’s worth noting that web scraping can sometimes be against the terms of service of certain websites. Ensure you have permission to scrape data from a website before doing so.