Using python Requests with javascript pages

While Selenium might seem tempting and useful, it has one main problem that can’t be fixed: performance. By calculating every single thing a browser does, you will need a lot more power. Even PhantomJS does not compete with a simple request. I recommend that you will only use Selenium when you really need to click buttons. If you only need javascript, I recommend PyQt (check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSH77vnOGqU to learn it).

However, if you want to use Selenium, I recommend Chrome over PhantomJS. Many users have problems with PhantomJS where a website simply does not work in Phantom. Chrome can be headless (non-graphical) too!

First, make sure you have installed ChromeDriver, which Selenium depends on for using Google Chrome.

Then, make sure you have Google Chrome of version 60 or higher by checking it in the URL chrome://settings/help

Now, all you need to do is the following code:

from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options
from selenium import webdriver

chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless")

driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options)

If you do not know how to use Selenium, here is a quick overview:

driver.get("https://www.google.com") #Browser goes to google.com

Finding elements:
Use either the ELEMENTS or ELEMENT method. Examples:

driver.find_element_by_css_selector("div.logo-subtext") #Find your country in Google. (singular)

• driver.find_element(s)_by_css_selector(css_selector) # Every element that matches this CSS selector
• driver.find_element(s)_by_class_name(class_name) # Every element with the following class
• driver.find_element(s)_by_id(id) # Every element with the following ID
• driver.find_element(s)_by_link_text(link_text) # Every with the full link text
• driver.find_element(s)_by_partial_link_text(partial_link_text) # Every with partial link text.
• driver.find_element(s)_by_name(name) # Every element where name=argument
• driver.find_element(s)_by_tag_name(tag_name) # Every element with the tag name argument

Ok! I found an element (or elements list). But what do I do now?

Here are the methods you can do on an element elem:

• elem.tag_name # Could return button in a .
• elem.get_attribute(“id”) # Returns the ID of an element.
• elem.text # The inner text of an element.
• elem.clear() # Clears a text input.
• elem.is_displayed() # True for visible elements, False for invisible elements.
• elem.is_enabled() # True for an enabled input, False otherwise.
• elem.is_selected() # Is this radio button or checkbox element selected?
• elem.location # A dictionary representing the X and Y location of an element on the screen.
• elem.click() # Click elem.
• elem.send_keys(“thelegend27”) # Type thelegend27 into elem (useful for text inputs)
• elem.submit() # Submit the form in which elem takes part.

Special commands:

• driver.back() # Click the Back button.
• driver.forward() # Click the Forward button.
• driver.refresh() # Refresh the page.
• driver.quit() # Close the browser including all the tabs.
• foo = driver.execute_script(“return ‘hello’;”) # Execute javascript (COULD TAKE RETURN VALUES!)

Good news: there is now a requests module that supports javascript: https://pypi.org/project/requests-html/

from requests_html import HTMLSession

session = HTMLSession()

r = session.get('http://www.yourjspage.com')

r.html.render()  # this call executes the js in the page

As a bonus this wraps BeautifulSoup, I think, so you can do things like

r.html.find('#myElementID').text

which returns the content of the HTML element as you’d expect.

its a wrapper around pyppeteer or smth? 🙁 i thought its something different

    @property
    async def browser(self):
        if not hasattr(self, "_browser"):
            self._browser = await pyppeteer.launch(ignoreHTTPSErrors=not(self.verify), headless=True, args=self.__browser_args)

        return self._browser

Using Selenium or jQuery enabled requests are slow. It is more efficient to find out which cookie is generated after website checking for JavaScript on the browser and get that cookie and use it for each of your requests.

In one example it worked through following cookies:

the cookie generated after checking for javascript for this example is "cf_clearance".
so simply create a session.
update cookie and headers as such:

s = requests.Session()
s.cookies["cf_clearance"] = "cb4c883efc59d0e990caf7508902591f4569e7bf-1617321078-0-150"
s.headers.update({
            "user-agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) 
               AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/89.0.4389.90 Safari/537.36"
        })
s.get(url)

and you are good to go no need for JavaScript solution such as Selenium. This is way faster and efficient. you just have to get cookie once after opening up the browser.

Some way to do that is to invoke your request by using selenium.
Let’s install dependecies by using pip or pip3:

pip install selenium

etc.

If you run script by using python3
use instead:

pip3 install selenium

(…)

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

driver = webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install())
url = 'http://myurl.com'

# Please wait until the page will be ready:
element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "div.some_placeholder")))
element.text = 'Some text on the page :)' # <-- Here it is! I got what I wanted :)