Not able to scrape data from dropdown box

Question

In the following website " http://www.msamb.com/apmcpri_rpt.aspx ".

The output change every time I click on an element in a dropdown but the url remains same. It is calling a java script if the value of the drop down changes. I tracked the Network and checked the request headers and form key-values and used it in postman. But it is returning the same page every time(" http://www.msamb.com/apmcpri_rpt.aspx " with nothing selected in dropdown).

Can someone please help in scraping this site?

Answer 1

There is a POST request sent each time you select an item from the dropdown. Simulate it in your code. requests package would help maintaining your web-scraping session. Sample code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

apmc = 'JALGAON'

url = 'http://www.msamb.com/apmcpri_rpt.aspx'
with requests.Session() as session:
    session.headers = {
        'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.0.3; ko-kr; LG-L160L Build/IML74K) AppleWebkit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/534.30',
        'X-Requested-With': 'XMLHttpRequest'
    }
    response = session.get(url)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content)

    # build an options mapping 
    options = {option.get_text(strip=True): option['value'] for option in soup.select("select#cpMainContent_cmb_comm option")[1:]}

    # parse form parameters
    form = soup.find("form", id="form1")
    params = {
        'ctl00$cpMainContent$cmb_comm': options.get(apmc),
        '__ASYNCPOST': 'true',
        'ctl00$cpMainContent$ScriptManager1': 'ctl00$cpMainContent$UpdatePanel1|ctl00$cpMainContent$cmb_comm',
        '__EVENTTARGET': 'ctl00$cpMainContent$cmb_comm',
        '__EVENTARGUMENT': form.find('input', {'name': '__EVENTARGUMENT'})['value'],
        '__LASTFOCUS': '',
        '__VIEWSTATE': form.find('input', {'name': '__VIEWSTATE'})['value'],
        '__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR': form.find('input', {'name': '__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR'})['value'],
        '__VIEWSTATEENCRYPTED': '',
        '__EVENTVALIDATION': form.find('input', {'name': '__EVENTVALIDATION'})['value']
    }

    response = session.post(url, data=params)

    # parse the results
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content)
    for row in soup.select("table#cpMainContent_GridView1_tab5 tr")[1:]:
        print row.find_all("td")[1].text