While it’s excellent for testing sites, it’s not as useful for writing a robust web scraper. First, Selenese just isn’t very powerful on its own. It’s theoretically possible to write a web scraper entirely in Selenese, but almost no one actually attempts it. However, that’s not actually a great idea. With all those helpful features, you may be considering writing a web scraper entirely in Selenium, using Selenese. Disadvantages of Using Selenium for Web Scraping
You can set this to repeat until there’s no longer a “next” button, indicating you’ve visited all the pages. For example, you could collect all product titles on a retail site by going to the first page of the catalog, scraping the titles, then using Selenium to click the “next” link and travel to the next page. Similarly, you can use Selenium to automate scrapes that travel through links on a site. The tool can scroll through the page, causing the site to perform AJAX calls and load more information. Selenium takes control of browser sessions, which makes it a solid tool for collecting data from sites that load asynchronously or that are otherwise heavy on JavaScript elements. Data collection from asynchronous sites Since it’s specifically designed to perform browser actions automatically, it has built-in features that make it easy to use your preferred browsers to run web scrapes. In particular, Selenium offers some unique web browser automation abilities. Just because Selenium wasn’t designed for scraping doesn’t mean it’s not useful. What does that have to do with web scraping? Quite a bit, actually. The Benefits of Using Selenium for Web Scraping When people refer to “Selenium,” they’re typically referring to Selenium WebDriver.
It is significantly lighter-weight than Selenium RC and performs fewer HTTP calls. Instead, WebDriver can directly start and control a browser instance or multiple if connected to Grid.
How to Use Selenium: What It Is and How It Works By integrating Selenium into your web scraper, you can perform more and better scrapes in less time. It’s not a one-stop-shop solution, but it offers unique capabilities that simplify many aspects of the scraping process. Selenium is one of the most helpful tools for performing web scrapes. For example, if you’re performing web scrapes, understanding how to write a Selenium web scraping program can help you collect more and better data than ever before. That’s not always true, but designing custom solutions is definitely easier for the person who needs them. The saying goes that if you want something done well, you need to do it yourself.