Internet extends fast and modern websites pretty often use dynamic content load mechanisms to provide the best user experience. Still, on the other hand, it becomes harder to extract data from such web pages, as it requires the execution of internal Javascript in the page context while scraping. Let's review several conventional techniques that allow data extraction from dynamic websites using Python.
Javascript (JS) becomes more popular as a programming language for web scraping. The whole domain becomes more demanded, and more technical specialists try to start data mining with a handy scripting language. Let's check out the main concepts of web scraping with Javascript and review the most popular libraries to improve data extraction flow.
In this article, we will learn how to create a simple e-commerce search API with multiple platform support: eBay and Amazon. AutoScraper and FastAPi provide the ability to create a powerful JSON API for the date. With Playwright's help, we'll extend our scraper and avoid blocking by using ScrapingAnt's web scraping API.
Playwright is a high-level API to control and automate headless Chrome (Chromium), Firefox and Webkit. It can be considered as an extended Puppeteer, as it allows using more browser types to automate modern web apps testing and scraping. Playwright API can be used in JavaScript & TypeScript, Python, C# and, Java. In this article, we are going to show how to set up a proxy in Playwright for all the supported browsers.
Web scraping a website with the actually supported or other browsers has a real benefit in ensuring that the scraper will not be banned by the fingerprint or the behavioral pattern. Playwright already provides full support for Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit out of the box without installing the browsers manually, but since most of the users out there use Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge instead of the open-source Chromium variant, in some scenarios, it's safer to use them to emulate a more realistic browser environment.
In this article, we'd like to share the current state of Playwright integration with Python and several helpful code snippets for understanding the code techniques.