Web Scraping with Python Selenium: Tutorial for Beginners

• Installing Selenium
• Testing
• Scraping with Selenium

In this article, we’ll cover an overview of web scraping with Selenium using a real-life example.

For a detailed tutorial on Selenium, see our blog.

Installing Selenium

1. Create a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv .env

2. Install Selenium using pip:

pip install selenium

3. Install Selenium Web Driver. See this page for details.

Testing

With virtual environment activated, enter IDLE by typing in python3. Enter the following command on IDLE:

>>> from selenium.webdriver import Chrome

If there are no errors, move on to the next step. If there is an error, ensure that chromedriver is added to the PATH.

Scraping with Selenium

Import required modules as follows:

from selenium.webdriver import Chrome, ChromeOptions
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

Add the skeleton of the script as follows:

def get_data(url) -> list:
   ...


def main():
    ...

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Create ChromeOptions object and set headless to True. Use this to create an instance of Chrome.

    browser_options = ChromeOptions()
    browser_options.headless = True

    driver = Chrome(options=browser_options)

Call the driver.get method to load a URL. After that, locate the link for the Humor section by link text and click it:

    driver.get(url)

    element = driver.find_element(By.LINK_TEXT, "Humor")
    element.click()

Create a CSS selector to find all books from this page. After that run a loop on the books and find the bookt title, price, stock availability. Use a dictionary to store one book information and add all these dictionaries to a list. See the code below:

 books = driver.find_elements(By.CSS_SELECTOR, ".product_pod")
    data = []
    for book in books:
        title = book.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "h3 > a")
        price = book.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, ".price_color")
        stock = book.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, ".instock.availability")
        book_item = {
            'title': title.get_attribute("title"),
            'price': price.text,
            'stock': stock. text
        }
        data.append(book_item)

Lastly, return the data dictionary from this function.

For the complete code, see main.py.

For a detailed tutorial on Selenium, see our blog.