Scrapy with Selenium
Explore how to combine Scrapy and Selenium to scrape dynamic websites effectively. This lesson teaches you to create custom downloader middleware that loads JavaScript content using Selenium, enabling Scrapy to parse fully rendered pages. You will understand the process flow, middleware implementation, and handling page synchronization for accurate data extraction.
We'll cover the following...
Now that we have added middleware to our stack, it is time to learn how to utilize it with Selenium.
Scrapy with dynamic sites
While Scrapy provides excellent modules for optimizing web scraping operations, it lacks built-in functionality to handle dynamic websites. To tackle this challenge, we need to integrate Selenium or another library alongside it. As we have already covered Selenium in previous lessons, we will use it in this module.
To efficiently scrape JavaScript-based websites, we will follow a three-step process:
We will use Scrapy to make the initial request.
We will pass this request to Selenium to load the DOM on our behalf.
Finally, we will use selectors to extract the data from the fully loaded DOM.
We learned that downloader middleware are ...