Scraping websites with Javascript enabled?

Question

I'm trying to scrape and submit information to websites that heavily rely on Javascript to do most of its actions. The website won't even work when i disable Javascript in my browser.

I've searched for some solutions on Google and SO and there was someone who suggested i should reverse engineer the Javascript, but i have no idea how to do that.

So far i've been using Mechanize and it works on websites that don't require Javascript.

Is there any way to access websites that use Javascript by using urllib2 or something similar? I'm also willing to learn Javascript, if that's what it takes.

Answer 1

I wrote a small tutorial on this subject, this might help:

http://koaning.io.s3-website.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/dynamic-scraping-with-python.html

Basically what you do is you have the selenium library pretend that it is a firefox browser, the browser will wait until all javascript has loaded before it continues passing you the html string. Once you have this string, you can then parse it with beautifulsoup.

Answer 2

I've had exactly the same problem. It is not simple at all, but I finally found a great solution, using PyQt4.QtWebKit.

You will find the explanations on this webpage : http://blog.motane.lu/2009/07/07/downloading-a-pages-content-with-python-and-webkit/

I've tested it, I currently use it, and that's great !

Its great advantage is that it can run on a server, only using X, without a graphic environment.