How to scrollIntoView() inside a specific dropdown(div) in Python
Question:
I am trying to scrape a website that requires me to first fill out certain dropdowns.
However, most of the dropdown selections are hidden and only appear in the DOM tree when I scroll down WITHIN the dropdown. Is there a solution I can use to somehow mimic a scroll wheel, or are there other libraries that could complement Selenium?
Answers:
There are several ways to scroll an element into view but the most reliable one in Selenium is evaluating javascripts scrollIntoview() function.
For example I use this example for scraping twitch.tv in my blog:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Art")
# find last item and scroll to it
driver.execute_script("""
let items=document.querySelectorAll('.tw-tower>div');
items[items.length-1].scrollIntoView();
""")
The javascript finds all "items" in the pagination page and scrolls the last one into view. In your case you should use:
driver.execute_script("""
let item = document.querySelector('DROPDOWN CSS SELECTOR');
item.scrollIntoView();
""")
You can read more about it here: https://scrapfly.io/blog/web-scraping-with-selenium-and-python/#advanced-selenium-functions
requests and BeautifulSoup are two libraries in python that can assist with scraping data. They allow you to get the url and make instances within the html language.
In order to inspect a specific part of a website you just need to right click & inspect on the item you want to scrape. This will open all the hidden paths you speak of to that specific tag.
I am trying to scrape a website that requires me to first fill out certain dropdowns.
However, most of the dropdown selections are hidden and only appear in the DOM tree when I scroll down WITHIN the dropdown. Is there a solution I can use to somehow mimic a scroll wheel, or are there other libraries that could complement Selenium?
There are several ways to scroll an element into view but the most reliable one in Selenium is evaluating javascripts scrollIntoview() function.
For example I use this example for scraping twitch.tv in my blog:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Art")
# find last item and scroll to it
driver.execute_script("""
let items=document.querySelectorAll('.tw-tower>div');
items[items.length-1].scrollIntoView();
""")
The javascript finds all "items" in the pagination page and scrolls the last one into view. In your case you should use:
driver.execute_script("""
let item = document.querySelector('DROPDOWN CSS SELECTOR');
item.scrollIntoView();
""")
You can read more about it here: https://scrapfly.io/blog/web-scraping-with-selenium-and-python/#advanced-selenium-functions
requests and BeautifulSoup are two libraries in python that can assist with scraping data. They allow you to get the url and make instances within the html language.
In order to inspect a specific part of a website you just need to right click & inspect on the item you want to scrape. This will open all the hidden paths you speak of to that specific tag.