MechanicalSoup VS requests-html

MechanicalSoup is a Python library for web scraping that combines the simplicity of Requests with the convenience of BeautifulSoup. It's particularly useful for interacting with web forms, like login pages. Here's a basic example to illustrate how you can use MechanicalSoup for web scraping:

Try with Mechanicalsoup https://mechanicalsoup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

You should try MechanicalSoup it uses Beautifulsoup but provides a simpler API using its StatefulBrowser filling forms and doing some other stuff is easier than just directly using requests and Beautifulsoup.

MechanicalSoup

requests-html

Ya, thanks for advice. When using requests_html library, I am trying to lower down the speed using response.html.render(timeout=1000), but it raise Runtime error instead on Google Colab: https://github.com/psf/requests-html/issues/517.

For dynamic js, prefer requests-html with xpath selection.

Example: requests-html which has a rather exhaustive README.md, but their dedicated page is not that helpful, if I remember correctly, and currently the domain is suspended.

When it comes to web scraping, the usual people recommend is beautifulsoup, lxml, or selenium. But I highly recommend people check out requests-html also. Its a library that is a happy medium between ease of use as in beautifulsoup and also good enough to be used for dynamic, javascript data where it would be overkill to use a browser emulator like selenium.

Quite possible. If you look at requests-html source code, it is simply one single python file that acts as a wrapper around a bunch of other packages, like requests, chromium, parse, lxml, etc., plus a couple convenience functions. So it could easily be some sort of bad dependency resolution.

What I do is try to see if I can use requests_html first before trying selenium. requests_html is usually enough if I dont need to interact with browser widgets or if the authentication isnt too difficult to reverse engineer.