Web Scraping with Selenium

Selenium is a powerful browser automation tool that's essential for scraping modern, JavaScript-heavy websites. Unlike Beautiful Soup, Selenium actually controls a real browser, allowing it to execute JavaScript and interact with dynamic content.

Why Selenium for web scraping?

• Executes JavaScript - handles dynamically loaded content
• Real browser interaction - clicks, scrolls, form submissions
• Waits for content - handles AJAX and async loading
• Handles SPAs - works with React, Vue, Angular apps
• Screenshots and debugging - see what the browser sees

When to use Selenium:

• Content loaded via JavaScript/AJAX
• Infinite scroll pages
• Sites requiring login or interaction
• Single Page Applications (SPAs)
• Content behind buttons or dropdowns

When NOT to use Selenium:

• Static HTML pages (use Beautiful Soup - faster)
• Large-scale scraping (too slow, resource-heavy)
• API available (always prefer official APIs)

Selenium vs alternatives:

• Beautiful Soup: Faster but can't handle JavaScript
• Scrapy: Better for large-scale, but needs plugins for JS
• Playwright: Newer, faster, better API (modern alternative)
• Puppeteer: Similar to Selenium but JavaScript only

How Selenium works:

1. Launches a real browser (Chrome, Firefox, etc.)
2. Controls it via WebDriver protocol
3. Executes JavaScript and waits for content
4. Extracts data after page is fully loaded

Common challenges:

• Slower than static scraping
• Resource intensive (uses real browser)
• Needs proper waits to handle timing
• Detection by anti-bot systems