I have been trying for hours to figure this out. From a building tutorial to just trying to find prebuilt ones, I can’t seem to make it click.

For context I am trying to scrape books myself that I can’t seem to find elsewhere so I can use and post them for others.

The scraper tutorial

Hackernoon tutorial by Ethan Jarell

I initially tried to follow this but I kept having a “couldn’t find module” error. Since I have never touched python prior to this, I am unaware how to fix this and the help links are not exactly helpful. If there’s someone who could guide me through this tutorial that would be great.

Selenium

Selenium Homepage

I don’t really get what this is but I think its some sort of python pack and it tells me to download using the pip command but that doesn’t seem to work (syntax error). I don’t know how to manually add it in because, again, I have little idea of what I’m doing.

Scrapy

Scrapy Homepage

This one seemed like it’d be an out-of-box deal but not only does it need the pip command to download but it has like 5 other dependencies it needs to function which complicates it more for me.

I am not criticizing these wares, I am just asking for help and if someone could help with the simplification of it all or maybe even point me to an easier method that would be amazing!

Updates

  • Figured out that I am supposed to run the command for pip in the command prompt thing on my computer, not the python runner. py -m followed by the pip request

  • Got the Ethan Jarrell tutorial to work and managed to add in selenium, which made me realize that selenium isn’t really helpful with the project. rip xP

  • Spent a bunch of time trying to workshop the basic scraper to work with dynamic sites, unsuccessful

  • Online self-help doesn’t go in as much as I would like, probably due to the legal grey area

  • obbeelEnglish
    11·
    1 month ago

    It needs a driver and the web-browser to be executed in headless mode. For Chrome that’s chrome-driver. You can get it here.

    To make a script for it, I recommend talking to a LLM. I have asked it to build scrapers before, so it does the job.

    If you want a practical use of Selenium being demonstrated, you can see it in LucidWebSearch plugin for Oobabooga.

    • Noah@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      6·
      1 month ago

      I recommend talking to a LLM

      Any recommendations? Not chat-GPT

      Also thanks for the help so far!

      • obbeelEnglish
        5·
        1 month ago

        Gemini, Perplexity, Poe. Creating a Selenium script isn’t that hard for them. You can try running your own, but it’s more less likely that it will produce good results. Best coder LLM I’ve seen out there for hosting is Yi Coder 9B.