You can achieve that with find_element():įantastic! Once again, all options work like a charm. Let's see some of the search strategies in action! Assume you want to select the ''Exercise #1'' card shown in the screenshot above.

Most of them aren't good for scraping, but they can still help you understand how selectors work. At the same time, remember that you must consider these auto-generated selectors only as a starting point. This feature is beneficial when using the XPATH or CSS_SELECTOR approach. You can also get XPath expressions and CSS selectors directly: right-click on an element, open the ''Copy'' menu, and choose either ''Copy selector'' or ''Copy XPath'' to get one related to the selected element.

Then, analyze the page's DOM and figure out a working selection strategy. For that, right-click on an HTML element and select ''Inspect'' to open DevTools: Click to open the image in full screen You might be wondering how to define an effective location strategy, and this is the answer: Use the browser's developer tools on your target page. find_elements: Returns all that match the search condition in an array.find_element: Returns the first HTML element that matches the search condition.Since the query can identify more than one element, the two methods behave as follows: price')įind_elements(By.CSS_SELECTOR, '.product-card. Selects HTML elements that match a CSS selectorįind_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, '.product-card. Selects HTML elements based on their class attributeįind_element(By.CLASSNAME, 'text-center')įind_elements(By.CLASSNAME, 'text-center') Selects HTML elements based on their tag name Selects HTML elements that contain a specific link text Selects HTML elements that match an XPath expression Selects HTML elements based on their name attribute Selects HTML elements based on their id attribute Verify that by running the command below in your terminal: Since many systems already have it configured, you might not even need to install it. Let's dig into web scraping with Selenium and Python! Getting Startedįirst of all, we'll go through the steps to have everything ready to follow this Selenium web scraping tutorial and run a headless browser. The library also provides several methods to interact with a page like a human user would, meaning you gain extra functionality and are more prepared to avoid being blocked. That's because you need to run JS, and Selenium enables that. Traditional scraping tools struggle to collect data from websites that rely on JavaScript. Selenium is a popular open-source library for web scraping that uses the WebDriver protocol to control browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

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