pydollvssplash

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Jun 01 2024 0.0.0(2025-02-01 00:00:00 ago)

4,193 15 399 BSD-3-Clause

Apr 25 2014 446 (month) 3.5(2020-06-16 13:27:02 ago)

Pydoll is a Python library for browser automation that uses the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) directly, designed to be undetectable by anti-bot systems. Unlike Selenium-based tools, Pydoll does not use WebDriver and avoids the common detection vectors that anti-bot systems look for.

Key features include:

Native CDP communication Connects directly to Chrome/Chromium via CDP websocket without intermediary drivers, avoiding the automation flags and fingerprints that WebDriver-based tools leave behind.
Event-driven architecture Built around an async event system that can listen for and react to browser events like network requests, console messages, and DOM changes.
Network interception Can intercept, modify, and mock network requests and responses, useful for blocking unnecessary resources or modifying API responses during scraping.
Async-first design Fully asynchronous API built on Python's asyncio for efficient concurrent automation.
Clean API Provides a high-level, Pythonic API for common browser automation tasks while still allowing direct CDP command execution for advanced use cases.
Multi-browser support Can manage multiple browser instances and pages concurrently.

Pydoll fills a similar niche to nodriver and camoufox — browser automation with a focus on avoiding detection — but takes a different approach by providing more granular control over CDP communication and network interception.

Splash is a javascript rendering service with an HTTP API. It's a lightweight browser with an HTTP API, implemented in Python 3 using Twisted and QT5.

It is built on top of the QtWebkit library and allows developers to interact with web pages in a headless mode, which means that the web pages are rendered in the background, without displaying them on the screen.

splash is particularly useful for web scraping and web testing tasks, as it allows developers to interact with web pages in a way that is very similar to how a human user would interact with the browser.

It also allows you to execute javascript and interact with web pages even if they use heavy javascript.

Unlike Selenium or Playwright, splash is powered by webkit embedded browser instead of a real browser like Chrome or Firefox. As a down-side splash requests are easy to detect and block when scraping websites with anti-scraping features.

One benefit of splash is that it seemlesly integrates with Scrapy.

Highlights

anti-detectcdpasync

Example Use

```python import asyncio from pydoll.browser import Chrome from pydoll.constants import By async def main(): async with Chrome() as browser: # Open a new page page = await browser.new_page() await page.go_to("https://example.com") # Find and interact with elements search_input = await page.find_element(By.CSS, "input[name='q']") await search_input.type_text("web scraping") submit_btn = await page.find_element(By.CSS, "button[type='submit']") await submit_btn.click() # Wait for results and extract content await page.wait_element(By.CSS, ".results") results = await page.find_elements(By.CSS, ".result-item") for result in results: title = await result.get_text() print(title) # Network interception example await page.enable_network_interception() # intercept and analyze API calls made by the page asyncio.run(main()) ```

```python # once splash server is started it can be requested to render pages through # HTTP requests: import requests url = "http://localhost:8050/render.html" payload = { 'url': 'https://www.example.com', 'timeout': 30, 'wait': 2 } response = requests.get(url, params=payload) # Get the page HTML print(response.text) ```