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Its not too complicated, you just need a headless browser. Having done a ton of web scraping projects, I’d recommend just starting with this approach as even si
by waprin 6y ago
Its not too complicated, you just need a headless browser. Having done a ton of web scraping projects, I’d recommend just starting with this approach as even sites that look pretty static use Javascript in subtle ways.
- hermanradtke 6y agoUsing a headless browser for scraping is a lot slower and resource intensive than parsing HTML.
- sullyj3 6y agoSure, but it might be the only way to get the data.
- hansvm 6y agoIt might be, but _starting_ a scraping project with a headless browser might be excessively expensive if you don't need the additional features.
- lyjackal 6y ago"only" is a bit of an overstatement. The data is always coming from somewhere, it just depends on how much effort needed to reverse engineer the JavaScript code path to the data
- PeterisP 6y agoI don't find this as a concern - in all the scraping I've done, the only bottleneck was the intentional throttling/rate limiting, not the speed and resources spent by the headless browser; a small, cheap machine could easily process many, many times more requests than it would be reasonable to crawl.
- lyjackal 6y agoData is usually embedded in json or available from an internal api when it's an SPA. Headless browser resources are pretty huge. When doing large scale scraping, headless browser should be a last resort