Data Scraping
The process of extracting data by means of a computer program that makes use of the output data produced by another computer program is known as “data scraping.” Web scraping is one of the most effective methods for obtaining data from the internet and, in certain instances, for transmitting that data to a different website.
Data Scraping
The process of extracting data by means of a computer program that makes use of the output data produced by another computer program is known as “data scraping.” Web scraping is one of the most effective methods for obtaining data from the internet and, in certain instances, for transmitting that data to a different website.
Selenium
In the context of testing applications on multiple browsers, the term “Selenium” refers to a set of technologies that are quite popular within the testing community. Selenium web scraping has become a common practice thanks to its support for a wide range of web browsers and its compatibility with a wide range of programming languages.
Data Scraping Using Selenium
- Open/Download Selenium in Browser
If you have previously downloaded pip (package installer for Python) for screen scraping, the first step is to launch it on your computer. If not, you may begin by downloading PyPI and decompressing it before running the setup.
Notably, you will need a browser driver in order for Selenium to be able to interface with the selected browser as a web scraper; Chrome is the ideal browser for this purpose.
To complete this step, proceed by launching Chrome, going to a search engine such as Google, entering “seleniumhq” and closing the browser.
- Import the Supporting Packages
As Selenium is also used in conjunction with other applications as an online web scraper, it is essential to import the necessary packages to facilitate data scraping. For instance, the open-source data analysis program ‘Pandas’ may be utilized.
- Enter Variables
This step involves defining your target folder, the search query for data scraping, and the site where you want to extract target data from. You can use it as a google scraper, Twitter scraper, LinkedIn scraper, or even an amazon scraper.
- Inspect the HTML Tags in Browser
HTML sites generally feature a unique identity for each tag connected with the information presented on any specific target site. Using this HTML site feature, the target site can be crawled with ease. You can do this by selecting ‘inspect’ from the context menu of a right-clicking window on the website.
Select ‘Inspect’ by right-clicking on the window and efficiently scrape data from the website. Then, proceed by clicking on the arrow displayed on the top left or pressing Ctrl-Shift-C to inspect a specific element and acquire the appropriate HTML tag.
- Extraction of Data Points
The desired data points will be retrieved using the ‘find_elements_by_xpath’ command on the Selenium web driver. Once you have collected all of the desired data points, you will then quit the driver and close the browser.
Note: Targets can modify selectors, thus it is essential to validate that the relevant selectors are accurate.
- Saving Extracted Data in Form of a Readable File
Now that all the data has been extracted, you may add columns to the data frame and use the ‘to CSV’ function to save the extracted data as a CSV file.
The CSV file you require will be downloaded to the place specified in the file path.
Conclusion
We hope you found this blog useful! You should now have a basic understanding of how to extract data from websites with Selenium. In search of data scraping tools to make your job go more quickly? Check out the Best Tools for Data Scraping now!
