![]() ![]() If you want to return an entire list of elements, for example, a list of tweets or some other content, you can simply add an “s” to the method call like this: The code above will only return the first instance that matches the parameters of the search. Reddit is a good example of this, it’s one of the more challenging websites to scrape, so after this tutorial you’ll be able to handle most other websites very easily in comparison! Returning multiple elements Other websites will actively try to prevent scraping and you’ll have to use more complicated selectors to find elements on the page. Most websites will be easy to scrape or interact with and you’ll be able to use simple CSS classes or IDs. My personal order for finding elements is: Whenever possible you’ll want to use those much simpler available options, but in some cases, you won’t have a choice. If you prefer watching a video you can follow along here:Īs you can see from the code above, it’s much easier to use something like a name or ID tag than to use Xpath or alternative search options. In this tutorial, you’ll be using Python but you could also slightly modify the code to be used in Javascript, C#, Java, PHP, and other languages. All of this is accessible through a uniform API that can be used with almost any programming language. One of the main selling points of Selenium is that it supports nearly all popular browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and others. Selenium’s primary use is for automated software testing but it is also commonly used for scraping content where rendering Javascript is necessary and any other activity requiring automation in the browser such as bots. Selenium is a tool designed for automating web browsers programmatically. Want to be able to magically make bots that do your work for you? In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use Selenium Webdriver to automate tasks, use it for testing applications, and also go into some lesser-known advanced features available with Selenium Webdriver What is Selenium
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