requestiumvssplash
Requestium is a Python library that merges the power of Requests, Selenium, and Parsel into a single integrated tool for automatizing web actions.
The library was created for writing web automation scripts that are written using mostly Requests but that are able to seamlessly switch to Selenium for the JavaScript heavy parts of the website, while maintaining the session.
Requestium adds independent improvements to both Requests and Selenium, and every new feature is lazily evaluated, so its useful even if writing scripts that use only Requests or Selenium.
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.
Example Use
from requestium import Session, Keys
session = Session(webdriver_path='./chromedriver',
browser='chrome-headless',
default_timeout=15)
# then session object can be used like requests and parsel:
title = session.get('http://samplesite.com').xpath('//title/text()').extract_first(default='Default Title')
# other advance functions like POST requests and proxy settings are also available:
s.post('http://www.samplesite.com/sample', data={'field1': 'data1'})
s.proxies.update({'http': 'http://10.11.4.254:3128', 'https': 'https://10.11.4.252:3128'})
# session can also be used like selenium as it exposes all selenium functions.
# like typing keys:
s.driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@class='user_name']").send_keys('James Bond', Keys.ENTER)
# 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)