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How to scrape links that do not have a href and not available in page source

Im trying to use selenium web driver to extract data and i get to see that one of the links that i want to click does not have a href. The html tags i see in inspect element are also not available in the page source.I badly want the link to be clicked and proceed to the next page.
The anchor tag that i see during inspect is as below and this seems to be having a angular JS
< a id="docs" ng-click="changeFragment('deal.docs')">
import time
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get('URL here');
time.sleep(5) # Let the user actually see something!
username = driver.find_element_by_name('USERID')
username.send_keys('12345')
password = driver.find_element_by_name('PASSWORD')
password.send_keys('password')
#search_box.submit()
driver.find_element_by_id("submitInput").submit()
time.sleep(5) # Let the user actually see something!
lnum = driver.find_element_by_name('Number')
lnum.send_keys('0589403823')
checkbox = driver.find_element_by_name('includeInactiveCheckBox').click()
driver.find_element_by_id("searchButton").click()
time.sleep(5)
driver.execute_script("​changeFragment('deal.docs')").click()
driver.quit()
I tried to use find element by xpath and script but both didnt work .
The url im trying access cant be shared as it can be accessed only through a specific network

Web scraping with BeautifulSoup won't work

Ultimately, I'm trying to open all articles of a news website and then make a top 10 of the words used in all the articles. To do this, I first wanted to see how many articles there are so I could iterate over them at some point, haven't really figured out how I want to do everything yet.
To do this, I wanted to use BeautifulSoup4. I think the class I'm trying to get is Javascript as I'm not getting anything back.
This is my code:
url = "http://ad.nl"
ad = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(ad.text.lower(), "xml")
titels = soup.findAll("article")
print(titels)
for titel in titels:
print(titel)
The article name is sometimes an h2 or an h3. It always has one and the same class, but I can't get anything through that class. It has some parents but it uses the same name but with the extension -wrapper for example. I don't even know how to use a parent to get what I want but I think that those classes are Javascript as well. There's also an href which I'm interested in. But once again, that is probably also Javascript as it returns nothing.
Does anyone know how I could use anything (preferably the href, but the article name would be ok as well) by using BeautifulSoup?

In case you don't want to use selenium. This works for me. I've tried on 2 PCs with different internet connection. Can you try?
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
cookies={"pwv":"2",
"pws":"functional|analytics|content_recommendation|targeted_advertising|social_media"}
page=requests.get("https://www.ad.nl/",cookies=cookies)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.content, 'html.parser')
articles = soup.findAll("article")
Then follow kimbo's code to extract h2/h3.

As #Sri mentioned in the comments, when you open up that url, you have a page show up where you have to accept the cookies first, which requires interaction.
When you need interaction, consider using something like selenium (https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/).
Here's something that should get you started.
(Edit: you'll need to run pip install selenium before running this code below)
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from selenium import webdriver
url = 'https://ad.nl'
# launch firefox with your url above
# note that you could change this to some other webdriver (e.g. Chrome)
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get(url)
# click the "accept cookies" button
btn = driver.find_element_by_name('action')
btn.click()
# grab the html. It'll wait here until the page is finished loading
html = driver.page_source
# parse the html soup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html.lower(), "html.parser")
articles = soup.findAll("article")
for article in articles:
# check for article titles in both h2 and h3 elems
h2_titles = article.findAll('h2', {'class': 'ankeiler__title'})
h3_titles = article.findAll('h3', {'class': 'ankeiler__title'})
for t in h2_titles:
# first I was doing print(t.text), but some of them had leading
# newlines and things like '22:30', which I assume was the hour of the day
text = ''.join(t.findAll(text=True, recursive=False)).lstrip()
print(text)
for t in h3_titles:
text = ''.join(t.findAll(text=True, recursive=False)).lstrip()
print(text)
# close the browser
driver.close()
This may or may not be exactly what you have in mind, but this is just an example of how to use selenium and beautiful soup. Feel free to copy/use/modify this as you see fit.
And if you're wondering about what selectors to use, read the comment by #JL Peyret.

Python Selenium: Iteration Error

I'm trying to download all xml files from a webpage. The process requires locating xml file download link one after the other, and once such a download link is clicked it leads to a form which needs to be submitted for the download to begin. The issue I'm facing lies in the iteration of these loops, once the first file is downloaded from the webpage I receive an error:
"selenium.common.exceptions.StaleElementReferenceException: Message: The element reference of stale: either the element is no longer attached to the DOM or the page has been refreshed"
The "97081 data-extension xml" is the 2nd downloadable file in the iteration. I've hereby attached the code, any suggestions to rectify this will be much appreciated.
import os
import time
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
fp = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
fp.set_preference("browser.download.folderList", 2)
fp.set_preference("browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting", False)
fp.set_preference("browser.download.dir", "F:\Projects\Poli_Map\DatG_Py_Dat")
fp.set_preference("browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk", "text/xml")
driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=fp)
driver.get('https://data.gov.in/catalog/variety-wise-daily-market-prices-data-cauliflower')
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
allelements = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//a[text()='xml']")
for element in allelements:
element.click()
class FormPage(object):
def fill_form(self, data):
driver.execute_script("document.getElementById('edit-download-reasons-non-commercial').click()")
driver.execute_script("document.getElementById('edit-reasons-d-rd').click()")
driver.find_element_by_xpath('//input[#name = "name_d"]').send_keys(data['name_d'])
driver.find_element_by_xpath('//input[#name = "mail_d"]').send_keys(data['mail_d'])
return self
def submit(self):
driver.execute_script("document.getElementById('edit-submit').click()")
data = {
'name_d': 'xyz',
'mail_d': 'xyz#outlook.com',
}
time.sleep(5)
FormPage().fill_form(data).submit()
time.sleep(5)
window_before = driver.window_handles[0]
driver.switch_to_window(window_before)
driver.back()

I found a workaround for you, no need to submit any fields.
You need to get the ID in the class field in the bottom of this picture (here for instance its 962721)
Then, use this URL like so :
https://data.gov.in/node/962721/download
This was found just doing a bit of "reverse-engineering". When you do web scraping, always have a look at the .js files and at your networking tab to see all the requests made.

How to yield fragment URLs in scrapy using Selenium?

from my poor knowledge about webscraping I've come about to find a very complex issue for me, that I will try to explain the best I can (hence I'm opened to suggestions or edits in my post).
I started using the web crawling framework 'Scrapy' long ago to make my webscraping, and it's still the one that I use nowadays. Lately, I came across this website, and found that my framework (Scrapy) was not able to iterate over the pages since this website uses Fragment URLs (#) to load the data (the next pages). Then I made a post about that problem (having no idea of the main problem yet): my post
After that, I realized that my framework can't make it without a JavaScript interpreter or a browser imitation, so they mentioned the Selenium library. I read as much as I could about that library (i.e. example1, example2, example3 and example4). I also found this StackOverflow's post that gives some tracks about my issue.
So Finally, my biggest questions are:
1 - Is there any way to iterate/yield over the pages from the website shown above, using Selenium along with scrapy?
So far, this is the code I'm using, but doesn't work...
EDIT:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# The require imports...
def getBrowser():
path_to_phantomjs = "/some_path/phantomjs-2.1.1-macosx/bin/phantomjs"
dcap = dict(DesiredCapabilities.PHANTOMJS)
dcap["phantomjs.page.settings.userAgent"] = (
"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/53 "
"(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.87")
browser = webdriver.PhantomJS(executable_path=path_to_phantomjs, desired_capabilities=dcap)
return browser
class MySpider(Spider):
name = "myspider"
browser = getBrowser()
def start_requests(self):
the_url = "http://www.atraveo.com/es_es/islas_canarias#eyJkYXRhIjp7ImNvdW50cnlJZCI6IkVTIiwicmVnaW9uSWQiOiI5MjAiLCJkdXJhdGlvbiI6NywibWluUGVyc29ucyI6MX0sImNvbmZpZyI6eyJwYWdlIjoiMCJ9fQ=="
yield scrapy.Request(url=the_url, callback=self.parse, dont_filter=True)
def parse(self, response):
self.get_page_links()
def get_page_links(self):
""" This first part, goes through all available pages """
for i in xrange(1, 3): # 210
new_data = {"data": {"countryId": "ES", "regionId": "920", "duration": 7, "minPersons": 1},
"config": {"page": str(i)}}
json_data = json.dumps(new_data)
new_url = "http://www.atraveo.com/es_es/islas_canarias#" + base64.b64encode(json_data)
self.browser.get(new_url)
print "\nThe new URL is -> ", new_url, "\n"
content = self.browser.page_source
self.get_item_links(content)
def get_item_links(self, body=""):
if body:
""" This second part, goes through all available items """
raw_links = re.findall(r'listclickable.+?>', body)
links = []
if raw_links:
for raw_link in raw_links:
new_link = re.findall(r'data-link=\".+?\"', raw_link)[0].replace("data-link=\"", "").replace("\"",
"")
links.append(str(new_link))
if links:
ids = self.get_ids(links)
for link in links:
current_id = self.get_single_id(link)
print "\nThe Link -> ", link
# If commented the line below, code works, doesn't otherwise
yield scrapy.Request(url=link, callback=self.parse_room, dont_filter=True)
def get_ids(self, list1=[]):
if list1:
ids = []
for elem in list1:
raw_id = re.findall(r'/[0-9]+', elem)[0].replace("/", "")
ids.append(raw_id)
return ids
else:
return []
def get_single_id(self, text=""):
if text:
raw_id = re.findall(r'/[0-9]+', text)[0].replace("/", "")
return raw_id
else:
return ""
def parse_room(self, response):
# More scraping code...
So this is mainly my problem. I'm almost sure that what I'm doing isn't the best way, so for that I did my second question. And to avoid having to do these kind of issues in the future, I did my third question.
2 - If the answer to the first question is negative, how could I tackle this issue? I'm opened to another means, otherwise
3 - Can anyone tell me or show me pages where I can learn how to solve/combine webscraping along javaScript and Ajax? Nowadays are more the websites that use JavaScript and Ajax scripts to load content
Many thanks in advance!

Selenium is one of the best tools to scrape dynamic data.you can use selenium with any web browser to fetch the data that is loading from scripts.That works exactly like the browser click operations.But I am not prefering it.
For getting dynamic data you can use scrapy + splash combo. From scrapy you wil get all the static data and splash for other dynamic contents.

Have you looked into BeautifulSoup? It's a very popular web scraping library for python. As for JavaScript, I would recommend something like Cheerio (If you're asking for a scraping library in JavaScript)
If you are meaning that the website uses HTTP requests to load content, you could always try to manipulate that manually with something like the requests library.
Hope this helps

You can definitely use Selenium as a standalone to scrap webpages with dynamic content (like AJAX loading).
Selenium will just rely on a WebDriver (basically a web browser) to seek content over the Internet.
Here are a few of them (but the most often used) :
ChromeDriver
PhantomJS (my favorite)
Firefox
Once your started, you can start your bot and parse the html content of the webpage.
I included a minimal working example below using Python and ChromeDriver :
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='chromedriver')
driver.get('https://www.google.com')
# Then you can search for any element you want on the webpage
search_bar = driver.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, 'tsf-p')
search_bar.click()
driver.close()
See the documentation for more details !

Scraping elements rendered using React JS with BeautifulSoup

I want to scrape anchor links with class="_1UoZlX" from the search results from this particular page - https://www.flipkart.com/search?as=on&as-pos=1_1_ic_sam&as-show=on&otracker=start&page=6&q=samsung+mobiles&sid=tyy%2F4io
When I created a soup from the page I realised that the search results are being rendered using React JS and hence I can't find them in the page source (or in the soup).
Here's my code
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
listUrls = ['https://www.flipkart.com/search?as=on&as-pos=1_1_ic_sam&as-show=on&otracker=start&page=6&q=samsung+mobiles&sid=tyy%2F4iof']
PHANTOMJS_PATH = './phantomjs'
browser = webdriver.PhantomJS(PHANTOMJS_PATH)
urls=[]
for url in listUrls:
browser.get(url)
wait = WebDriverWait(browser, 20)
wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "_1UoZlX")))
soup = BeautifulSoup(browser.page_source,"html.parser")
results = soup.findAll('a',{'class':"_1UoZlX"})
for result in results:
link = result["href"]
print link
urls.append(link)
print urls
This is the error I'm getting.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "fetch_urls.py", line 19, in <module>
wait.until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.CSS_SELECTOR, "_1UoZlX")))
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/support/wait.py", line 80, in until
raise TimeoutException(message, screen, stacktrace)
selenium.common.exceptions.TimeoutException: Message:
Screenshot: available via screen
Someone mentioned in this answer that there is a way to use selenium to process the javascript on a page. Can someone elaborate on that? I did some googling but couldn't find an approach that works for this particular case.

There is no problem with your code but the website you are scraping - it does not stop loading for some reason that prevents the parsing of the page and subsequent code you wrote.
I tried with wikipedia to confirm the same:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
listUrls = ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_and_union_territory_capitals_in_India"]
# browser = webdriver.PhantomJS('/usr/local/bin/phantomjs')
browser = webdriver.Chrome("./chromedriver")
urls=[]
for url in listUrls:
browser.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(browser.page_source,"html.parser")
results = soup.findAll('a',{'class':"mw-redirect"})
for result in results:
link = result["href"]
urls.append(link)
print urls
Outputs:
[u'/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories_of_India_by_area', u'/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_by_GDP_per_capita', u'/wiki/Constitutional_republic', u'/wiki/States_and_territories_of_India', u'/wiki/National_Capital_Territory_of_Delhi', u'/wiki/States_Reorganisation_Act', u'/wiki/High_Courts_of_India', u'/wiki/Delhi_NCT', u'/wiki/Bengaluru', u'/wiki/Madras', u'/wiki/Andhra_Pradesh_Capital_City', u'/wiki/States_and_territories_of_India', u'/wiki/Jammu_(city)']
P.S. I'm using a chrome driver in order to run the script against the real chrome browser for debugging purposes. Download the chrome driver from https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html?path=2.27/

Selenium will render the page including the Javascript. Your code is working properly. It is waiting for the element to be generated. In your case, Selenium didn't get that CSS element. The URL which you gave is not rendering the result page. Instead of that, It is generating the following error page.
http://imgur.com/a/YwFyE
This page is not having the CSS class. Your code is waiting for that particular CSS element. Try Firefox web driver to see what is happening.