parsel VS playwright-python

An alternative for beautifulsoup is https://github.com/scrapy/parsel also from the scrapy team.

variable.css(".X5PpBb::text").get() # returns a text value variable.css(".gs_a").xpath("normalize-space()").get() # https://github.com/scrapy/parsel/issues/192#issuecomment-1042301716 variable.css(".gSGphe img::attr(srcset)").get() # returns a attribute value variable.css(".I9Jtec::text").getall() # returns a list of strings values variable.xpath('th/text()').get() # returns text value using xpath

Something I don't see discussed when this topic is brought up is that Scrapy's HTML parsing library, parsel, can be installed separately from scrapy itself. You can use it in place of beautifulsoup and, imo, it's much easier to use.

Playwright

An alternative is to use a package like playwright (or Selenium) to run a browser remotely and login.

Using the tools at hand is often the best approach. That said, I've spent most of the last 13 years of my career automating browsers. For years, I used Selenium with a variety of libraries. After switching to Puppeteer/Playwright, I have zero interest in going back lol. Playwright actually has first party Python support. (Puppeteer has a port called Pyppeteer, but it's no longer maintained and the author recommends using Playwright)

https://playwright.dev/python/

This is pretty great for web automation https://playwright.dev/python/

Last I checked, pyppeteer wasn't a thing anymore, and I haven't tried Playwright but if it has a headless mode, thats what you want so you don't have a browser open.

Playwright

there are cases where a file contains at least 2 programming languages . A case like this is when using the playwright-python library i.e. the code is mainly in python, but it can contain also JS code within a page.evaluate() function. When I try to comment out some lines within the page.evaluate() function, VS Code uses the "#" symbol, instead of "//". I can use multiple cursors to insert the "//"., but it's not so convenient, So I was wondering if there is a way to tell VS Code that this part of code is JS and it should use "//" for commenting out or if there is a plugin that can do this job (I didnt find one...)

Playwright is pretty cool: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-python