Data doesn’t always come neatly packaged in a table or streaming through some API.
Oftentimes it’s just out there — free range flocks of it on the Wild, Wild Web, just waiting for a cowboy to come by and herd it to the meat factory for slaughter.

I’m that cowboy.

I spend a bunch of time shepherding wild, untamed data sets — or more accurately, automating webscrapers to perform such tasks on a regular schedule. This started pretty simply when someone said, “There’s no way we can get that data – at least not at the scale we need.”

The way I look at it is, if somebody can slowly…humanly…extract data from a website by point-and-click, copy-and-paste, manually downloading, or any other means, then I should be able to make a computer do it — faster, at higher volume, and at consistent intervals, if necessary.

The trick is figuring it out for the computer, which is nothing like a goold ol’ point-and-click or copy-and-paste. However, figure it out once, and the job is automated ad infinitum (or until it chokes on a bug or unforeseen edge case).

For some sites, this is easy – you just need the page’s source code, possibly some regex, and time to munge through the HTML. For simple projects, this might only require Python’s requests library, though it seems one gains a bit more power tinkering with BeautifulSoup as well. However, some data is hidden behind a point-and-click action, or a button push. Both of these tools are rendered impotent when it comes to such JavaScript-heavy webpages.

If only you could just automate a browser, right?

Your wish is Selenium’s command. Of course, things get a little more complex (e.g., you need to properly install selenium and a browser’s webdriver), but it’s worth it. The better I get at using selenium, the more I realize is possible and the less I find myself using requests or BeautifulSoup (though honestly, I often still rely on BeautifulSoup; also, selenium is overkill for simple tasks).

In several upcoming (and previous) installments, I go over some up-and-running instructions and code chunks.

• Install Selenium
• Getting Started w/ Selenium