Beautiful Soup Selector returns an empty list

Question

So Im doing the automate the boring stuff course and Im trying to scrape the amazon prices for the automate the boring stuff book, but it is returning an empty string no matter what and as a result an index error occurs at elems[0].text.strip() and i don’t know what to do.

def getAmazonPrice(productUrl):
    headers = {'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0'} # to make the server think its a web browser and not a bot
    res = requests.get(productUrl, headers=headers)
    res.raise_for_status()


    soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(res.text, 'html.parser')
    elems = soup.select('#mediaNoAccordion > div.a-row > div.a-column.a-span4.a-text-right.a-span-last')
    return elems[0].text.strip()


price = getAmazonPrice('https://www.amazon.com/Automate-Boring-Stuff-Python-2nd-ebook/dp/B07VSXS4NK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=30NW5VCV06ZMP&dchild=1&keywords=automate+the+boring+stuff+with+python&qid=1586810720&sprefix=automate+the+bo%2Caps%2C288&sr=8-1')
print('The price is ' + price)

Asked By: DeltaHaxor

||

Source

Answer 1

Your request will trigger a 503 error from Amazon. Perhaps due to Amazon’s anti-scraping effort. So perhaps you should consider some other means.

import requests

headers = {'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0'} # to make the server think its a web browser and not a bot

productUrl = 'https://www.amazon.com/Automate-Boring-Stuff-Python-2nd-ebook/dp/B07VSXS4NK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=30NW5VCV06ZMP&dchild=1&keywords=automate+the+boring+stuff+with+python&qid=1586810720&sprefix=automate+the+bo%2Caps%2C288&sr=8-1'

res = requests.get(productUrl, headers=headers)

print (res)

output:

<Response [503]>

Answered By: dgg32

Answer 2

You need to change the parser to lxml and use headers = {'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}

def getAmazonPrice(productUrl):
    headers = {'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'} # to make the server think its a web browser and not a bot
    res = requests.get(productUrl, headers=headers)
    res.raise_for_status()


    soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(res.text, 'lxml')
    elems = soup.select_one('#mediaNoAccordion > div.a-row > div.a-column.a-span4.a-text-right.a-span-last')
    return elems.text.strip()


price = getAmazonPrice('https://www.amazon.com/Automate-Boring-Stuff-Python-2nd-ebook/dp/B07VSXS4NK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=30NW5VCV06ZMP&dchild=1&keywords=automate+the+boring+stuff+with+python&qid=1586810720&sprefix=automate+the+bo%2Caps%2C288&sr=8-1')
print('The price is ' + price)

Snapshot:

If you want to use select then

def getAmazonPrice(productUrl):
    headers = {'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'} # to make the server think its a web browser and not a bot
    res = requests.get(productUrl, headers=headers)
    res.raise_for_status()


    soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(res.text, 'lxml')
    elems = soup.select('#mediaNoAccordion > div.a-row > div.a-column.a-span4.a-text-right.a-span-last')
    return elems[0].text.strip()


price = getAmazonPrice('https://www.amazon.com/Automate-Boring-Stuff-Python-2nd-ebook/dp/B07VSXS4NK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=30NW5VCV06ZMP&dchild=1&keywords=automate+the+boring+stuff+with+python&qid=1586810720&sprefix=automate+the+bo%2Caps%2C288&sr=8-1')
print('The price is ' + price)

Try with this.

def getAmazonPrice(productUrl):
    headers = {'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0'}  # to make the server think its a web browser and not a bot
    res = requests.get(productUrl, headers=headers)
    res.raise_for_status()


    soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(res.text, 'lxml')
    elems = soup.select('#mediaNoAccordion > div.a-row > div.a-column.a-span4.a-text-right.a-span-last')
    return elems[0].text.strip()


price = getAmazonPrice('https://www.amazon.com/Automate-Boring-Stuff-Python-2nd-ebook/dp/B07VSXS4NK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=30NW5VCV06ZMP&dchild=1&keywords=automate+the+boring+stuff+with+python&qid=1586810720&sprefix=automate+the+bo%2Caps%2C288&sr=8-1')
print('The price is ' + price)

Answered By: KunduK

Beautiful Soup Selector returns an empty list

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