An easy guide to scrape CSS styles using Scrapy

When it comes to web scraping, I am skilled in using both scrapy and selenium webdrivers. However, I have noticed that selenium webdriver tends to be quite slow. Despite this, I find it convenient for extracting CSS properties of a webelement, such as:

webElement.value_of_css_property('font-size')

Is there a way to achieve the same result using only scrapy without relying on selenium webdriver?

Answer №1

If you want to extract content from a website, it's crucial to have the content rendered in a real browser. Scrapy downloader is not equipped as a browser and can only access the initial HTML page without handling JavaScript or downloading additional CSS or JS files.

Scrapy allows you to retrieve the style attribute value of an element but nothing beyond that. For more advanced web scraping tasks, tools like selenium are recommended.

Furthermore, if you prefer to avoid depending on a physical display, you can automate headless browsers like PhantomJS or run browsers in a virtual display environment.

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