#Web scraper click button how to

select_one('a') gets an anchor/link element, select_one('body') gets the body element

To get a tag, such as, , use the naked name for the tag.

Both of these methods use CSS selectors to find elements, so if you're rusty on how CSS selectors work here's a quick refresher: To find elements and data inside our HTML we'll be using select_one, which returns a single element, and select, which returns a list of elements (even if only one item exists). Sometimes there will be a disallow all pages followed by allowed pages like this: Many times you'll see a * next to Allow or Disallow which means you are either allowed or not allowed to scrape everything on the site. On the other hand, we are disallowed from scraping anything from the /scripts/subfolder. In this example we're allowed to request anything in the /pages/subfolder which means anything that starts with /pages/. The Crawl-delay tells us the number of seconds to wait before requests, so in this example we need to wait 10 seconds before making another request.Īllow gives us specific URLs we're allowed to request with bots, and vice versa for Disallow. A * means that the following rules apply to all bots (that's us). We don't really need to provide a User-agent when scraping, so User-agent: * is what we would follow. Common bots are googlebot, bingbot, and applebot, all of which you can probably guess the purpose and origin of. Some robots.txt will have many User-agents with different rules. The User-agent field is the name of the bot and the rules that follow are what the bot should follow. Since this article is available as a Jupyter notebook, you will see how it works if you choose that format. If I'm just doing some quick tests, I'll usually start out in a Jupyter notebook because you can request a web page in one cell and have that web page available to every cell below it without making a new request. We don't want to be making a request every time our parsing or other logic doesn't work out, so we need to parse only after we've saved the page locally. Every time we scrape a website we want to attempt to make only one request per page. With this in mind, we want to be very careful with how we program scrapers to avoid crashing sites and causing damage. With a Python script that can execute thousands of requests a second if coded incorrectly, you could end up costing the website owner a lot of money and possibly bring down their site (see Denial-of-service attack (DoS)). this is my first web scraping project beyond the projects.Įdit: just tried adding a new request at the end of def parse and that failed to loop the spider back through def first_request.Every time you load a web page you're making a request to a server, and when you're just a human with a browser there's not a lot of damage you can do. Please forgive me if I misunderstood what you were trying to tell me to do. # I assume the callback to first_request would go here. I'm assuming I need to add some kind of callback to first_request in my parse method in order for it to properly loop. Selector = now I just get the first page. Def first_request is as follows: def first_request(self, response): To the meta dict in the start_requests method, got rid of the click PageMethod in that same dictionary, and added a callback to the new def first_request. Ok, so I added origin = 'start_requests', This is obviously just the data on the second page. The above scraper clicks on the button when it starts its request, but I want it to click on the button after the for loop in the parse method and then loop through it again so that I can get the data from every country. import scrapyįrom scrapy_playwright.page import PageMethodįor link in response.follow(link.get(), callback=self.parse_cat)

#Web scraper click button how to

I can't figure out how to get my spider to click on the next button only after scraping that page's data. I have to click the button to get the next page's data. So I can't just go to the following page by scraping that button's href attribute because there is none. The only problem here is that the next page button at the bottom doesn't direct you to a separate URL. I want my crawler to be able to go to the main page, follow each link to the page for each country, scrape the data, and then repeat this on the next page.

I'm trying to scrape the CIA World Factbook.