requests-html VS playwright-python

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.

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 (Puppeteer has a port called Pyppeteer, but it's no longer maintained and the author recommends using Playwright)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