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Welcome back to the next part in our Python for Daily Fantasy Sports Series!
In this video we are going to be learning a more advanced tool for web scraping
called Selenium. Selenium is a python package that allows for interaction with
the web page beyond simply updating the URL.
We will be using Selenium in addition to Beautiful Soup for our web scraping needs
going forward, so if you aren't familiar with Beautiful Soup, i'll post a link to
my previous Beautiful soup videos for you right up here.
Now, let's get to coding.
Requirements::
Everything from BS4 Tutorial
+
Pip Install Selenium
Gecko Driver
Gecko Explanation
- Gecko is basically an interface that allows firefox to be controlled by a third
party, aka your python code. You must be up to date on firefox and gecko, if you
write some code that works, and it later stops working, this is a likely issue.
Selenium Documentation
--Important functions/process needed for
Finding elements
Selecting elements
These tactics allow us to automate interactions with the webpages, which
makes larger scale web scraping MUCH more efficient.
For Example:
NBA.com stats, each page will need to be interacted with to pull the
stat base. URL can only bring us to the landing page of top 50 results.
URL can be looped to cover different stat pages, but we will need to
interact with the webpage itself to move forward.
Why it is important to understand how to inspect the elements on the page,
very similar to the way we established the table we wanted to use in the
beautiful soup tutorial. Now, we will need to identify the elements on the
page that we want to interact with, then how to interact with them