Handling JavaScript and Anti-scraping Measures
Use Playwright/Selenium for JS-rendered content and rate limiting.
Why JavaScript Matters
Modern websites render content with JavaScript after page load. Static HTML scrapers like requests+BS4 see the skeleton, not the rendered DOM.
# Static scraper sees:
# <div id="app"></div>
# Rendered page has:
# <div id="app">
# <h1>Product List</h1>
# <ul>... dynamically loaded items ...</ul>
# </div>Playwright for Python
Playwright controls a real browser (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit) programmatically. It waits for JavaScript to execute before extracting content.
# pip install playwright
# playwright install
import asyncio
from playwright.async_api import async_playwright
async def main():
async with async_playwright() as p:
browser = await p.chromium.launch()
page = await browser.new_page()
await page.goto("https://example.com")
title = await page.inner_text("h1")
print(title)
await browser.close()
asyncio.run(main())All lessons in this course
- HTTP Requests with requests and httpx
- Parsing HTML with BeautifulSoup
- Building a Scrapy Spider
- Handling JavaScript and Anti-scraping Measures