Parsing json var inside script tag

Question

I'm currently trying to scrape the json output of the follow 'https://sports.bovada.lv/soccer/premier-league'

it has a source with the following

<script type="text/javascript">var swc_market_lists = {"items":[{"description":"Game Lines","id":"23", ... </script>

I'm trying to get the contents of the swc_market_lists var

Now the issue I have is that when I use the following code

import requests
from lxml import html



url = 'https://sports.bovada.lv/soccer/premier-league'
r = requests.get(url)
tree = html.fromstring(r.content)
var = tree.xpath('//script')
print(var)

I get an empty var value.

I have also tried saving the r.text and viewing it but I don't see the script tags in there.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

You need to pass the User-Agent header to make it work:

r = requests.get(url, headers={"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.103 Safari/537.36"})

To get the desired script, you can check for presence of swc_market_lists in the text:

script = tree.xpath('//script[contains(., "swc_market_lists")]/text()')[0]
print(script)

To extract the swc_market_lists variable value:

import re

data = re.search(r"var swc_market_lists = (.*?);$", script).group(1)
print(data)

Then, to make it easy to work with it, load it with json.loads() into a Python dictionary:

import json
data = json.loads(data)