soup.findAll returning empty list

Question

I am trying to scrape with soup and am obtaining an empty set when I call findAll

from urllib.request import urlopen as uReq
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as soup

my_url='https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/SearchDisplayView?catalogId=10123&langId=44&storeId=10151&krypto=70KutR16JmLgr7Ka%2F385RFXrzDpOkSqx%2FRC3DnlU09%2BYcw0pR5cfIfC0kOlQywiD%2BTEe7ppq8ENXglbpqA8sDUtif1h3ZjrEoQkV29%2B90iqljHi2gm2T%2BDZHH2%2FCNeKB%2BkVglbz%2BNx1bKsSfE5L6SVtckHxg%2FM%2F%2FVieWp8vgaJTan0k1WrPjCrVuDs5WnbRN#langId=44&storeId=10151&catalogId=10123&categoryId=&parent_category_rn=&top_category=&pageSize=60&orderBy=RELEVANCE&searchTerm=milk&beginIndex=0&hideFilters=true&categoryFacetId1='

uClient = uReq(my_url)
page_html = uClient.read()
uClient.close()

page_soup = soup(page_html,'html.parser')

containers = page_soup.findAll("div",{"class":"product"}) 
containers

I also got empty datasets from these articles: findAll returning empty for html

and BeautifulSoup find_all() returns no data

Can anyone offer any help?

Answer 1

The page content is loaded with javascript, so you can't just use BeautifulSoup to parse it. You have to use another module like selenium to simulate javacript execution.

Here is an exemple:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as soup
from selenium import webdriver

url='https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/SearchDisplayView?catalogId=10123&langId=44&storeId=10151&krypto=70KutR16JmLgr7Ka%2F385RFXrzDpOkSqx%2FRC3DnlU09%2BYcw0pR5cfIfC0kOlQywiD%2BTEe7ppq8ENXglbpqA8sDUtif1h3ZjrEoQkV29%2B90iqljHi2gm2T%2BDZHH2%2FCNeKB%2BkVglbz%2BNx1bKsSfE5L6SVtckHxg%2FM%2F%2FVieWp8vgaJTan0k1WrPjCrVuDs5WnbRN#langId=44&storeId=10151&catalogId=10123&categoryId=&parent_category_rn=&top_category=&pageSize=60&orderBy=RELEVANCE&searchTerm=milk&beginIndex=0&hideFilters=true&categoryFacetId1='

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get(url)

page = driver.page_source
page_soup = soup(page,'html.parser')

containers = page_soup.findAll("div",{"class":"product"})
print(containers)
print(len(containers))

OUTPUT:

[
<div class="product "> ...
...,
<div class="product hl-product hookLogic highlighted straplineRow" ...    
]

64