seleniumvssplash
Selenium is a Python package that allows developers to automate web browsers. It provides a way for developers to interact with web browsers programmatically, simulating user interactions such as clicking links, filling out forms, and navigating between pages. Selenium can be used to automate tasks such as web scraping, testing web applications, and automating repetitive tasks on websites.
Selenium is built on top of WebDriver, which is a browser automation API that allows Selenium to interact with web browsers. Selenium supports a wide variety of web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.
One of the main advantages of Selenium is that it can be used with many different programming languages, not only Python, and it also supports different platforms.
The package also provide a set of APIs that allows you to interact with web pages, you can locate elements, interact with them, get their properties and interact with javascript, you can use the APIs to automate the browser and interact with web pages in the same way a human user would.
Selenium is widely used in web scraping, web testing, and other automation tasks because it allows developers to automate web browsers in a way that is very similar to how a human user would interact with the browser.
Overall, Selenium is a powerful and versatile tool for automating web browsers and is widely used in web scraping, web testing, and other automation tasks.
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 selenium import webdriver
# Create an instance of the webdriver
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
# Navigate to a website
driver.get("http://www.example.com")
# Find an element by its id
element = driver.find_element_by_id("example-id")
# Interact with the element
element.click()
# Find an element by its name
element = driver.find_element_by_name("example-name")
# Fill an input form
element.send_keys("example text")
# Find and click a button
driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[text()='Search']").click()
# Wait for the page to load
driver.implicitly_wait(10)
# Get the page title
print(driver.title)
# Close the browser
driver.close()
# 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)