Python Selenium Scraping Crashes, Can I Find Elements For Part of The Web Page?

Question

I am trying to scrape some data from a website. This website has a 'load more products' button. I'm using:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("""//*[@id="showmoreresult"]""").click()

to hit the button and this loops for a set number of iterations.

The problem I'm running into is once those number of iterations have been completed, I want to extract text from the webpage using:

posts = driver.find_elements_by_class_name("hotProductDetails")

However, this seems to crash Chrome, and thus I can get no data out. What I'd like to do, is populate posts with the new products that have loaded after each iteration.

After 'Load More' has been clicked, I want to grab the text from the 50 products that have just loaded, append to my list and continue.

I can run the line posts = driver.find_elements_by_class_name("hotProductDetails") within each iteration, but it grabs every element on the page every time, and really slows down the process.

Is there anyway of achieving this in Selenium or am I limited using this library?

This is the full script:

import csv
import time
from selenium import webdriver
import pandas as pd

def CeXScrape():
    print('Loading Chrome...')
    chromepath = r"C:\Users\leonK\Documents\Python Scripts\chromedriver.exe"
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(chromepath)

    driver.get(url)

    print('Prepping Webpage...')    
    time.sleep(2)    
    driver.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);")

    y = 0
    BreakClause = ExceptCheck = False    
    while y < 1000 and BreakClause == False:
        y += 1
        time.sleep(0.5)
        try:
            driver.find_element_by_xpath("""//*[@id="showmoreresult"]""").click()
            ExceptCheck = False
            print('Load Count', y, '...')
        except: 
            if ExceptCheck: BreakClause = True
            else: ExceptCheck = True
            print('Load Count', y, '...Lag...')
            time.sleep(2)
            continue

    print('Grabbing Elements...')
    posts = driver.find_elements_by_class_name("hotProductDetails")
    cats = driver.find_elements_by_class_name("superCatLink")

    print('Generating lists...')
    catlist = []
    postlist = []    
    for cat in cats: catlist.append(cat.text)
    print('Categories Complete...')
    for post in posts: postlist.append(post.text)
    print('Products Complete...')    
    return postlist, catlist

prods, cats = CeXScrape()

print('Extracting Lists...')

cat = []
subcat = []
prodname = []
sellprice = []
buycash = []
buyvoucher = []

for c in cats: 
    cat.append(c.split('/')[0])
    subcat.append(c.split('/')[1])

for p in prods:
    prodname.append(p.split('\n')[0])
    sellprice.append(p.split('\n')[2])
    if 'WeBuy' in p:
        buycash.append(p.split('\n')[4])
        buyvoucher.append(p.split('\n')[6])
    else:
        buycash.append('NaN')
        buyvoucher.append('NaN')    

print('Generating Dataframe...')

df = pd.DataFrame(
        {'Category' : cat,
         'Sub Category' : subcat,
         'Product Name' : prodname,
         'Sell Price' : sellprice,
         'Cash Buy Price' : buycash,
         'Voucher Buy Price' : buyvoucher})

print('Writing to csv...')

df.to_csv('Data.csv', sep=',', encoding='utf-8')

print('Completed!')

Answer 1

Use an XPATH and limit the products you get. If you get 50 products each time then use something like below

"(//div[@class='hotProductDetails'])[position() > {} and position() <= {}])".format ((page -1 ) * 50, page * 50)

This will give you 50 products every time and you increase the page # to get the next lot. Doing it all in one go will anyways crash it