How to Scrape Dynamic Web Pages with JavaScript using Python?

How to Scrape a Dynamic Page (JavaScript) in Python

When dealing with web scraping, static HTML pages are relatively straightforward to handle. However, the challenge arises when the content on the target page is dynamically generated by JavaScript.

In Python, using urllib2.urlopen(request) for page content reads only what's presented in the HTML, which may not include JavaScript-generated elements. To access this dynamic content, we need to simulate a browser environment within Python code.

Using Selenium with PhantomJS

Selenium is a Python library that allows interaction with web browsers. PhantomJS is a headless browser that runs without a graphical user interface. Together, they provide a suitable way to scrape dynamic content.

import requests
from selenium import webdriver

# Ensure PhantomJS is installed and in the current path
print(webdriver.PhantomJS().version)  # Print version for confirmation

url = 'my_url'

# Create a PhantomJS webdriver
driver = webdriver.PhantomJS()
driver.get(url)

# Retrieve the element with id "intro-text"
p_element = driver.find_element_by_id('intro-text')

# Print the text content of the element
print(p_element.text)

Using Dryscape

Dryscape is another Python library designed specifically for headless JavaScript scraping.

import dryscrape
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = 'my_url'

# Create a Dryscrape session
session = dryscrape.Session()
session.visit(url)

# Get the page body
response = session.body()
soup = BeautifulSoup(response)

# Find the element with id "intro-text"
soup.find(id='intro-text')

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