This page explains how to do web scraping with Selenium IDE commands. Web scraping works if the data is inside the HTML of a website. If you want to extract data from a PDF, image or video you need to use visual screen scraping instead.
- Web Scraping Selenium Python
- Python Scrapy Selenium
- Web Scraping Selenium Python
- Selenium Webdriver Tutorial
- Web Scraping Selenium
Web Scraping Selenium Python
When to use what command?
The table belows shows the best command for each type of data extraction. Click the recommended command for more information and example code.
Navigating to a URL with Selenium. Now we’re ready to write some code. Let’s start off by creating an instance of a Chrome WebDriver (the driver is an IDisposable object, so it should be instantiated in a using statement) and navigating to a URL (I’ll be using this scraping test site).Additionally, let’s wait for 5 seconds before the browser is closed.
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| Data to extract is in... | Command to use | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Visible website text, for example text in a table just like this one, or a price on website | storeText | |
| Text in input fields (input box, text area, select drop down,...) | storeValue | Do not confuse this command with storeEval, which is not for web scraping. |
| Get the status of a checkbox or radiobutton | storeChecked | |
| URL 'behind' an image | storeAttribute@href | storeAttribute | xpath=...@href extracts the link of any element - if it has one! If that fails, consider browser automation to copy the link to the ${!clipboard} variable. |
| ALT text 'behind' an image | storeAttribute@alt | The storeAttribute command can be used to get any attribute the HTML element has. For example, use @alt to get the 'Alt' text of an image. |
| Page title | storeTitle | |
| Table content: Row/Column/Cell | storeText with XPath locator | See TABLE Web Scraping or automate browser addon |
| Data from a list e. g. search results | Loop over storeText | See How to web scrape search results |
| Save complete web page source code | XType | ${KEY_CTRL+KEY_S}* | On Mac it is ${KEY_CMD+KEY_S}. |
| Save complete web page with images | XType | ${KEY_CTLR+KEY_S}* | See Forum post: How to save the entire HTML code |
| Take screenshot of website | captureEntirePageScreenshot* | This saves the complete website as image. |
| Take screenshot of a web page element | storeImage* | This is an easy way to extract images. The other option is to download them. |
| Text found only website source code | sourceExtract* | e. g. Google Analytics ID. For text inside page comments or Javascript, this is the only option |
| PDF, Image, Video, Canvas | OCRExtractRelative* | This screen scraping command works everywhere because it works visually. The disadvantage is that it is slower than the pure HTML-based commands like storeText. |
| Text from outside the web page | OCRExtractRelative* | For example, if you want to extract data from a browser extension or a desktop app |
Web Scraping Selenium Python
This story consists of an introduction to dynamic websites and explains how to do dynamic web scraping for 50000 results. Let’s begin with the introduction to dynamic websites. Dynamic websites. This page explains how to do web scraping with Selenium IDE commands. Web scraping works if the data is inside the HTML of a website. If you want to extract data from a PDF, image or video you need to use visual screen scraping instead. When to use what command? The table belows shows the best command for each type of data extraction. In this article I will show you how it is easy to scrape a web site using Selenium WebDriver.I will guide you through a sample project which is written in C# and uses WebDriver in conjunction with the Chrome browser to login on the testing page and scrape the text from the private area of the website. Downloading the WebDriver. First of all we need to get the latest version of Selenium Client.
(*) These commands are only available in the UI.Vision RPA Selenium IDE. They are not part of the classic Selenium IDE.
See also
Selenium Webdriver Tutorial
- - Screen scraping (scraping/data extraction with computer vision, OCR)
- - Form filling with Selenium IDE (the opposite of web scraping)
- - File uploads with Selenium IDE
- - Best Selenium IDE Locator Strategy
- - RPA Software User Manual.
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Web Scraping Selenium
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