Beautiful Soup Vs Selenium

Beautiful Soup Vs Selenium

November 16, 2021
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Comparison Between Selenium vs BeautifulSoup - Limeproxies

Comparison Between Selenium vs BeautifulSoup – Limeproxies

Web scraping is becoming a fundamental task for most businesses as businesses thrive on data to stay ahead of the competition. As such, web scraping is a common task that is frequently performed.
Developers of web scraping software greatly use selenium, BeautifulSoup, and Scrapy libraries, but which is the best for you? new users always try to compare selenium vs BeautifulSoup, but as both libraries are different they have their pros and cons.
So the best library to use would be the one that best suits your project.
Here, we would discuss each library extensively, and let you know which is best for each type of web scraping Quick LinksJump straight to the section of the post you want to read:SeleniumBeautifulSoupScrapyComparing Selenium vs BeautifulSoup and ScrapySelenium vs Beautifulsoup; Which Should You Choose? Selenium
Selenium as an API allows you to control a headless browser through a series of programs. It was created primarily for automated web testing, but due to its compatibility with JavaScript, it is also used for web scraping.
As websites have improved and upgraded, they have introduced more functions that depend on JavaScript to run.
Examples of such functions are bottomless pages and asynchronous loading. Using regular web scraping scripts would be a problem as they can’t scrape content found in JavaScript elements.
The only way would be to load the full page first. Selenium on the other hand can run web scraping even if the content is nested in JavaScript elements.
Selenium also brings versatility to the table. You can run it on different programming languages apart from java such as python,, and Ruby.
You can also use selenium to control every major web browser such as chrome, internet explorer, and Firefox. This is in addition to the long-standing threads of problems and solutions concerning the library.
When using selenium, your actions aren’t limited to loading web pages. You can also perform other actions that allow you better interact with the website such as mouse clicks and filling forms.
Selenium controls headless browsers and so requires a lot of resources. This reduces its efficiency and creates a scene where better options are required. Even though puppeteer and playwright are controversially better options, selenium is still great for scraping a small number of pages that use JavaScript.
The most alluring features of selenium, in summary, are as follows:
Selenium can easily handle AJAX and PJAX requests
It can be used with JavaScript concepts
Also Read: How to Match Browser Location Settings to External IP Address
BeautifulSoup
BeautifulSoup is a python based parsing library that allows you to extract data from a badly written web page. It structures an HTML or XML web page, gets the data you need from amongst the lot, and allows you to extract the required data in the right format.
However, it can crawl pages or make GET requests so it’s not all-encompassing.
BeautifulSoup is made up of different parsing tools such as, lxml, and HTML5lib. This way, you can try out different parsing methods to reap their benefits in different instances.
A huge pro of BeautifulSoup is its ease of use. with just a few lines of code, you can build a scraper. This doesn’t imply that it breaks easily either. And so BeautifulSoup is popular among developers for these reasons and others.
There is an online community with various solutions to different problems you may face during using this library.
Even though BeautifulSoup permits parallel requests, it isn’t easy to set up and still lags when compared to Scrapy in terms of speed.
So if you have a small web scraping task that doesn’t require huge data extraction, you can use BeautifulSoup.
The advantages of using BeautifulSoup in summary are:
Ease to learn
Community support to help with issues when they arise
The documentation is comprehensive and allows for easy learning
Scrapy
Scrapy is a complete package when it comes to web scraping. It provides you with the tools you need to crawl web pages, download data and parse it, and then store it in the format of your choice.
Since Scrapy is based on python language, and also open-source, it’s popular among developers for web scraping.
Scrapy supports both middleware and extensions as it was made to be extensible. This brings about great functionality to Scrapy scripts. You can also add your proxies, handle cookies and sessions, and control the crawl depth.
It also has an interactive console so you can be sure you have chosen the right expressions.
An alluring feature of Scrapy is its asynchronous way of handling and processing requests. This allows you to extract data with speed even if from multiple pages at once. So if you are interested in large scale scraping, this is a great option for you.
Bear in mind that the functionalities and features reduce its ease of use. so you will need to put in the time and effort to know your way around the tool. You will also require a headless browser for your java operations.
In summary, the features of Scrapy include:
Its easily extensible
It uses less memory and CPU storage
Scrapy supports data extraction from HTML sources
There is good support from the online community for developers
With Scrapy, you can build a robust and efficient system that has a lot of functions
It is fast
It’s a portable library
Comparing Selenium vs BeautifulSoup and ScrapyEvery library has its pros and cons, and so we must first compare them in their strengths and weaknesses before making a choice. When comparing selenium vs BeautifulSoup, the following are factors to consider.
Performance
One of the ways to compare selenium vs BeautifulSoup is the performance of both. Selenium is pretty effective and can handle tasks to a good extent. BeautifulSoup on the other hand is slow but can be improved with multithreading. This is a con of BeautifulSoup because the programmer needs to know multithreading properly.
Scrapy is faster than both as it makes use of asynchronous system calls. So it’s faster and performs better than other libraries.
Extensibility
BeautifulSoup is king when it comes to handling small projects with low-level complexity. This is because it works with simple and flexible codes. And so if you are new and want to perform web scraping quickly, BeautifulSoup is the library for you. Selenium is also great especially when you are dealing with a website that has a lot of features hinged on java. Note however that the data size when using selenium should be limited.
Scrapy allows for the execution of a robust and flexible project. This is thanks to the middleware that allows the addition of custom functionality. It’s great for use with big projects as you can easily transfer existing projects into another project.
Ecosystem
Both selenium and BeautifulSoup have a good ecosystem but do not allow easy use of proxies. This is one of the disadvantages of both libraries as it prevents the use of the libraries for complex projects.
Scrapy has a good ecosystem and allows you to use proxies to automate your web scraping tasks. That’s why it’s more ideal for use when you have complex projects as you can send multiple requests at once.
Selenium vs Beautifulsoup; Which Should You Choose? No matter your budget, you can comfortably use any of the libraries as they are all free and also open source. They also have a community of developers to support you as you use the library. Your choice of one over the other however depends on the project you have at hand.
If you have a complex task at hand, then Scrapy would be the best for you. its architecture allows it to handle complex web tasks. You can even extend its functionality if you choose.
BeautifulSoup is the best option for you if you have a small task at hand. All you need to do is install the request module and the HTML parser of your choice.
If the website you would be scraping from has a lot of JavaScript used, then selenium would come to your rescue.
Instead of looking for the best one when comparing selenium vs BeautifulSoup, and also Scrapy, you should learn them all. They all have their pros and cons and good knowledge of all will save you the stress of having to use just one for all your tasks.
Web scraping has become a very important process in the business world. It provides you with the daily data you need for analysis and decision making. While they are different types of task sizes and websites you can obtain data from, they are various libraries you can use to make your task easier.
Comparing selenium vs BeautifulSoup allows you to see that BeautifulSoup is more user-friendly and allows you to learn faster and begin web scraping smaller tasks easier. Selenium on the other hand is important when the target website has a lot of java elements in its code.
In all, you should have good knowledge of all the tools so that you can choose the best tool for your task at every point.
About the authorRachael ChapmanA Complete Gamer and a Tech Geek. Brings out all her thoughts and Love in Writing Techie to get started? Try it free for 3 days
Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup, Selenium, or Scrapy?

Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup, Selenium, or Scrapy?

Find the best scraping tool for your Python projectPhoto by 卡晨 on UnsplashThe internet is full of data available for you to start your Data Science project. Obtaining that data could be as simple as copying and pasting it, but when it comes to large data, web scraping is the best solution. However, if you google “how to web scrape with Python, ” you’ll get many tutorials using different Python libraries and this guide, we’ll analyze the 3 most popular web scraping tools in Python, so you can choose the one that suits best to your autiful Soup can pull data out of HTML and XML files. On top of that, it’s the easiest to learn among the 3 ever, Beautiful Soup has some dependencies, such as the need of the request library to make requests to the website and the use of external parsers to extract data; for example, XML and HTML parser. These dependencies make it complicated to transfer code between ’s see a simple example for extracting data with Beautiful Soup:As we can see, only a few lines of code are needed to extract data with BeautifulSoup, but we need to import requests to access the website and to parse the lenium wasn’t originally designed for web scraping. In fact, Selenium is a web driver designed to render web pages for test automation of web makes Selenium great for web scraping because many websites rely on JavaScript to create dynamic content on the page. Other web scraping tools like Beautiful Soup don’t have this functionality, limiting the extraction of data available on most lenium is not as easy to learn as Beautiful Soup; however, it’s still a friendly tool since it allows code to mimic human behavior such as clicking on a button, selecting dropdown menus, maximizing windows, ’s see an example of extracting data with Selenium:One of the disadvantages of Selenium is speed. Web scraping with Selenium is slower than HTTP requests to the web browser because all the scripts present on the web page will be executed. However, if speed isn’t a top priority, Selenium will be a good is a web scraping framework built especially for web scraping and written entirely in Python. It’s built on top of Twisted, an asynchronous network framework, which allows applications to respond to different network connections without using traditional threading of the biggest advantages of Scrapy is speed. Since it’s asynchronous, Scrapy spiders don’t have to wait to make requests one at a time, but it can make requests in parallel. This increases efficiency, which makes Scrapy memory and CPU efficient compared to the previous web scraping tools found on Wikimedia CommonsSome drawbacks of Scrapy is that it doesn’t handle JavaScript by default, but it relies on Splash to do the job. Also, the learning curve to learn Scrapy is steeper than tools like Beautiful Soup and the installation process and setup can be a bit complicated.
An Introduction to Selenium and Beautiful Soup - Medium

An Introduction to Selenium and Beautiful Soup – Medium

Photo by Nicolas Picard on UnsplashOne of the many things you might have heard about while learning about python is web scraping. When I was working on a personal project, I had to collect weather data from multiple counties and looked to web scraping to gather that data. Two of the most useful tools that you can utilize when dealing with web scraping are Selenium and Beautiful autiful Soup is a python library that makes it easy for users to scrape data from web pages. The tools make it easier to navigate through html or XML files and search for information through a tree-like structure. You can search for specific tags, attributes, or ids. The tools also allow the user to navigate through relations such as children and lenium is a set of tools that allows the user to automate a web driver. To truly understand the importance of this while web scraping, let us take an example. In my project, when I needed weather data, I required multiple months of data. However, the information was not on just one web page. I had to move to multiple pages to collect this data. The last thing you want to do is move to each site by hand, grab the specific data you are looking for, and then move on to the next site. The tools from selenium allow the user to automate the process of going to each site and collecting the necessary information. This makes collecting the data a lot faster and smoother. Not to mention you don’t have to stay on your computer while collecting the data. You could set a program and allow it collect the data for autiful SoupOf course, the first step to using this library is to install the package. The current release of this package as of October 3rd 2020 is Beautiful Soup 4. 9. 3. An easy way to install the Beautiful Soup is withpip install beautifulsoup4If you are using jupyter notebook, after you set up a new notebook, you want to import the package using the following code:from bs4 import BeautifulSoupSo now that the library is set up, we want to be able to access a web page. If you are just beginning and want to try scraping only a single page, I would suggest using the Requests module. The Requests module allows the user to collect a web requestsThe next step is to find a website to scrape. There are certain sites out there that were specifically designed to allow people to learn how to scrape. One example is from Books to Scrape. It is only a demo website, so some of the information such as prices and ratings were assigned random values, but you won’t be in danger of possibly being kicked off the ml_page = (‘)Once we have a website requested, we want to pass the page through beautiful = BeautifulSoup(ntent, ”)When going through Beautiful Soup constructor, the page is converted into Unicode. Unicode is “an international encoding standard for using different languages and scripts. ” We can take a quick look at the information and see its structure by using the following will show all the information on the page, which is a lot. When scraping, we only want a specific portion of that information. So instead of trying to read through the entire page, we can use the Inspect Element Feature. When you are on a certain page, if you right click the page, there is an inspect button. For example, on the Book to Scrape page, if you right clicked on the price of the first book, you will see an Inspect pressing this button, a side window will open up and directly navigate to its position on the document and highlight you highlight different portions of inspect elements page, it will highlight the respective portions of the page. A single bookThe

of booksSo, if we wanted to specifically look for the prices of the books, we would want a variable where we are only looking through that selection. The first step is using the find method. When we are on the website, we can use the inspect elements to find the

that contains all the books. Above that, there is a unique

with an alert = (‘div’, class_=”alert alert-warning”)From there we can navigate down to the container that has the = xt_siblingNow that we have all the books, we can take a closer look at the the prices. If you look carefully at the elements, you can see that the price is in a paragraph with a class called price_color. There is a findAll method that allows us to find each case within in the books = ndAll(‘p’, class_=’price_color’)This gives us a list of prices. If we wanted to find more information like the min, max, or mean of the prices on the page, we would need to first convert the information into text and then convert the text from string to ices_text = [ for price in prices]Now that we have a list of prices in string format, we can convert to a float if we remove the British pounds ices_fl = [float(price[1:]) for price in prices_text]Now we have a list of prices on that page and we can learn more by finding such information like which was the most expensive book in the list. However, as mentioned above, sometimes you need information from multiple websites and that is where Selenium can leniumAs before, the first step is to install the suite of install seleniumpip install webdriver-managerpip install selectorlibNext we import a number of tools into our selenium import webdriverfrom import ChromeDriverManagerfrom import WebDriverWaitfrom pport import expected_conditions as ECfrom import Byfrom import NoSuchElementExceptionfrom import TimeoutExceptionfrom from selectorlib import Extractorimport timeNow this may seem like a lot, but if you are checking multiple sites and your internet is moving slowly, you don’t want for a site to be skipped because the first website did not back to my example of collecting weather data, I ran a function where it grabbed a table from multiple pages. However, when I returned after the function finished, I found that half my data set was duplicated because the website had not loaded a basic example of how you can go to multiple sites, let us go back to Books to Scrape website. This website has multiple pages of books to iterate through. The first step in this case is to decide which browser you want to = (ChromeDriverManager(). install())This will open a new window in a Chrome browser that will be controlled by the computer. Next, we order the computer to go to the (‘)Using Selenium, we can have the computer click certain buttons if you know what element you are trying to click. In the driver, you can use the find_element method and you choose which way you want to find the element and then what that element is. In this case will look for the XPath. To find the XPath, you use the inspect elements on the button you want to click, then you right click the highlighted element and choose to copy the following code then will click the button and take the browser to the next ick_next = nd_element(, /html/body/div/div/div/div/section/div[2]/div/ul/li[2]/a)The page then can be put through beautiful soup and go through the same process in beautiful soup as seen = BeautifulSoup(ge_source, ”)Confirming Your Page Has LoadedAs mentioned before, sometimes the page will not load at the same speed throughout the program. To confirm that the page has loaded, one way is to wait for an element to be displayed. timeout = 5 try: element_present = esence_of_element_located((, ‘main’)) WebDriverWait(driver, timeout)(element_present) except TimeoutException: print(“Timed out waiting for page to load”) finally: print(“Page loaded”)Looking at this code, the presence_of_element_located() method will tell us if the website has been loaded. The WebDriverWait will force the program to wait using the until method until the element is located, which is what confirms that the page has been loaded.

Frequently Asked Questions about beautiful soup vs selenium

Is BeautifulSoup or Selenium better?

Beautiful Soup would fit better for small and simple projects, while Selenium would be in the middle between these two options since it can extract data from websites that use JavaScript, but the approach it uses for web scraping isn’t efficient.Dec 16, 2020

Does Selenium work with BeautifulSoup?

When used together, Selenium and Beautiful Soup are powerful tools that allow the user to web scrape data efficiently and quickly.Mar 14, 2021

What is BeautifulSoup and Selenium?

Beautiful Soup is a Python library that uses an HTML/XML parser and turns the web page/html/xml into a tree of tags, elements, attributes, and values. … The tree provides methods / properties of the BeautifulSoup object which facilitates iterating through the content to retrieve information of interest.Feb 18, 2021

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