Dealing with Dynamic Content

One of the challenges in web scraping is dealing with dynamic content, which is content that is loaded onto a web page after the initial page load, often using JavaScript. This can make it difficult for web scrapers to extract the desired information, as the content is loaded with a delay. In this lesson, we’ll learn a few best practices to handle this challenge.

Wait for elements to load

When scraping a web page with dynamic content, it’s crucial to ensure that the elements we need to interact with are fully loaded before attempting to access them. Otherwise, it will throw an error saying that the element is not found. Puppeteer provides a waitForSelector function that waits for a specified selector to appear in the DOM before proceeding. This approach is considered a best practice, rather than simply adding a random delay, as it is more reliable.

The below code snippet shows how to implement this in a scraping script: