Can't get data from inside of span-tag with beautifulsoup
Question
I am trying to scrape Instagram page, and want to get/access div-tags present inside of span-tag. but I can't! the HTML of the Instagram page looks like as
<head>--</head>
<body>
<span id="react-root" aria-hidden="false">
<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="POST" role="presentation">…</form>
<section class="_9eogI E3X2T">
<main class="SCxLW o64aR" role="main">
<div class="v9tJq VfzDr">
<header class=" HVbuG">…</header>
<div class="_4bSq7">…</div>
<div class="fx7hk">…</div>
</div>
</main>
</section>
</body>
I do, it as
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib.request as urllib2
html_page = urllib2.urlopen("https://www.instagram.com/cherrified_/?hl=en")
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_page,"lxml")
span_tag = soup.find('span') # return span-tag correctly
span_tag.find_all('div') # return empty list, why ?
please also specify an example.
1 answers
solution1
1 ACCPTED 2019-06-26 20:43:59
Instagram is a Single Page Application powered by React, which means its source is just a simple "empty" page that loads JavaScript to dynamically generate the content in the browser after downloading.
Click "View source" or go to view-source:https://www.instagram.com/cherrified_/?hl=en in Chrome. This is the HTML you download with urllib.request .
You can see that there is a single <span> tag, which does not include a <div> tag. (Note: <div> inside a <span> is not allowed ).
Scraping instagram.com this way is not possible. It also might not be legal (I am not a lawyer).
Notes:
- your HTML code example doesn't include a closing tag for
<span>. - your HTML code example doesn't match the link you provide in the python snippet.
- in the last line of the python snippet you probably meant
span_tag.find_all('div')(note the variable name and the singular'div').
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