How can I parse a website using Selenium and Beautifulsoup in python?

Question

New to programming and figured out how to navigate to where I need to go using Selenium. I'd like to parse the data now but not sure where to start. Can someone hold my hand a sec and point me in the right direction?

Any help appreciated -

Answer 1

Assuming you are on the page you want to parse, Selenium stores the source HTML in the driver's page_source attribute. You would then load the page_source into BeautifulSoup as follows:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

driver.get('http://news.ycombinator.com')

html = driver.page_source

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

for tag in soup.find_all('title'):
    print(tag.text)
    
Hacker News

Answer 2

As your question isn't particularly concrete, here's a simple example. To do something more useful read the BS docs. You will also find plenty of examples of selenium (and BS )usage here in SO.

from selenium import webdriver
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

browser=webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('http://webpage.com')

soup=BeautifulSoup(browser.page_source)

#do something useful
#prints all the links with corresponding text

for link in soup.find_all('a'):
    print link.get('href',None),link.get_text()

Answer 3

Are you sure you want to use Selenium? For this reasons I used PyQt4, it's very powerful, and you can do what ever you want.

I can give you a sample code, that I just wrote, just change url and you good to go:

#! /usr/bin/env python2.7

from PyQt4.QtCore import *
from PyQt4.QtGui import *
from PyQt4.QtWebKit import *
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import sys, signal

class Browser(QWebView):
    def __init__(self):
        QWebView.__init__(self)
        self.loadProgress.connect(self._progress)
        self.loadFinished.connect(self._loadFinished)
        self.frame = self.page().currentFrame()

    def _progress(self, progress):
        print str(progress) + "%"

    def _loadFinished(self):
        print "Load Finished"
        html = unicode(self.frame.toHtml()).encode('utf-8')
        soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
        print soup.prettify()
        self.close()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)
    br = Browser()
    url = QUrl('http://web site that can contain javascript.com')
    br.load(url)
    br.show()
    if signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, signal.SIG_DFL):
        sys.exit(app.exec_())
    app.exec_()