Key takeaways:
- Playwright is a powerful browser automation toolkit for web scraping, supporting cross-platform and cross-language operations.
- Playwright allows for easy scraping of dynamic javascript-powered websites without requiring advanced web development knowledge.
- Playwright supports multiple programming languages, including Python, and provides a more modern API compared to Selenium and Puppeteer.
# Playwright for Web Scraping
- Playwright is a browser automation toolkit that supports cross-platform and cross-language operations.
- It is primarily intended for website test suites but is also capable of general browser automation and web scraping.
- Playwright allows for automation of web headless browsers like Firefox or Chrome, enabling navigation, clicking buttons, writing text, and executing javascript.
- It is a great tool for web scraping as it allows scraping of dynamic javascript-powered websites without the need to reverse engineer their behavior.
# Playwright vs Selenium vs Puppeteer
- Playwright supports many programming languages, including Python, while Puppeteer is only available in Javascript.
- Playwright uses Chrome Devtools Protocol (CDP) and a more modern API, whereas Selenium is using webdriver protocol and a less modern API.
- Playwright supports both asynchronous and synchronous clients, whereas Selenium only supports a synchronous client and Puppeteer an asynchronous one.
# Setting Up Playwright for Python
- Playwright for Python can be installed through pip.
- It's best to use either Chrome or Firefox browsers for Playwright scraping as these are the most stable implementations and often are least likely to be blocked.
# Playwright Basics for Web Scraping
- To start, launch a browser and create a new browser tab.
- For web scraping, you need only a handful of Playwright features: navigation, button clicking, text input, javascript execution, and waiting for content to load.
# Navigation and Waiting
- Use the
page.goto()function to navigate to any URL. - For javascript-heavy websites, wait for a particular element to appear on the page to ensure that the page has loaded.
# Parsing Data
- Use the browser's HTML parsing capabilities through Playwright's locators feature.
- For more robust parsing, consider using traditional Python parsing libraries like parsel or beautifulsoup.
# Clicking Buttons and Text Input
- Use Playwright's locator functionality to interact with web components.
- For example, find the search box, input a search query, and click the search button or press Enter.
# Scrolling and Infinite Pagination
- To retrieve the rest of the results, continuously scroll to the last result visible on the page to trigger new page loads.
- Use Playwright's
scroll_into_view_if_needed()function to scroll the last result into view.
# Advanced Functions
- Evaluate javascript code in the context of the current page for more complex web scraping targets.
- Intercept requests and responses to modify background requests or collect secret data from background responses.
- Block unnecessary resources to optimize bandwidth usage during web scraping.
# Avoiding Blocking
- While Playwright uses a real browser, it's still possible to determine whether it's controlled by a real user or automated by an automation toolkit.
- Consider using ScrapFly's alternative for javascript rendering and javascript scenario features to access thousands of custom web browsers that can render javascript-powered pages without being blocked.
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