Slow scrolling down the page using Selenium

Question

I'm trying to scrape some data from flight search page.

This page works this way:

You fill in a form and then you click on the button search - this is ok. When you click the button you are redirected to the page with results and here is the problem. This page is adding continuously results for example for one minute which is not a big deal - problem is to get all of these results. When you are in real browser, you have to scroll down the page and these results are appearing. So I've tried to scroll down using Selenium. It scrolls down at the bottom of the page probably so fast or it is a jump instead of scrolling that the page doesn't load any new results.

When you are scrolling down slowly, it reloads results but if you do it very quickly it stops loading.

I'm not sure if my code helps to understand that so I'm attaching it.

SEARCH_STRING = """URL"""

class spider():

    def __init__(self):
        self.driver = webdriver.Firefox()

    @staticmethod
    def prepare_get(dep_airport,arr_airport,dep_date,arr_date):
        string = SEARCH_STRING%(dep_airport,arr_airport,arr_airport,dep_airport,dep_date,arr_date)
        return string


    def find_flights_html(self,dep_airport, arr_airport, dep_date, arr_date):
        if isinstance(dep_airport, list):
            airports_string = str(r'%20').join(dep_airport)
            dep_airport = airports_string

        wait = WebDriverWait(self.driver, 60) # wait for results
        self.driver.get(spider.prepare_get(dep_airport, arr_airport, dep_date, arr_date))
        wait.until(EC.invisibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, '//img[contains(@src, "loading")]')))
        wait.until(EC.invisibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, u'//div[. = "Poprosíme o trpezlivosť, hľadáme pre Vás ešte viac letov"]/preceding-sibling::img')))
        self.driver.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);")

        self.driver.find_element_by_xpath('//body').send_keys(Keys.CONTROL+Keys.END)
        return self.driver.page_source

    @staticmethod 
    def get_info_from_borderbox(div):
        arrival = div.find('div',class_='departure').text
        price = div.find('div',class_='pricebox').find('div',class_=re.compile('price'))
        departure = div.find_all('div',class_='departure')[1].contents
        date_departure = departure[1].text 
        airport_departure = departure[5].text
        arrival = div.find_all('div', class_= 'arrival')[0].contents
        date_arrival = arrival[1].text
        airport_arrival = arrival[3].text[1:]
        print 'DEPARTURE: ' 
        print date_departure,airport_departure
        print 'ARRIVAL: '
        print date_arrival,airport_arrival

    @staticmethod
    def get_flights_from_result_page(html):

        def match_tag(tag, classes):
            return (tag.name == 'div'
                    and 'class' in tag.attrs
                    and all([c in tag['class'] for c in classes]))

        soup = mLib.getSoup_html(html)
        divs = soup.find_all(lambda t: match_tag(t, ['borderbox', 'flightbox', 'p2']))

        for div in divs:
            spider.get_info_from_borderbox(div)

        print len(divs)


spider_inst = spider() 

print spider.get_flights_from_result_page(spider_inst.find_flights_html(['BTS','BRU','PAR'], 'MAD', '2015-07-15', '2015-08-15'))

So the main problem is in my opinion that it scrolls too fast to trigger new loading of the results.

Have you any idea how to make it work?

Answer 1

Here is a different approach that worked for me involving scrolling into view of the last search result and waiting for additional elements to load before scrolling again:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.common.exceptions import StaleElementReferenceException
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC


class wait_for_more_than_n_elements(object):
    def __init__(self, locator, count):
        self.locator = locator
        self.count = count

    def __call__(self, driver):
        try:
            count = len(EC._find_elements(driver, self.locator))
            return count >= self.count
        except StaleElementReferenceException:
            return False


driver = webdriver.Firefox()

dep_airport = ['BTS', 'BRU', 'PAR']
arr_airport = 'MAD'
dep_date = '2015-07-15'
arr_date = '2015-08-15'

airports_string = str(r'%20').join(dep_airport)
dep_airport = airports_string

url = "https://www.pelikan.sk/sk/flights/list?dfc=C%s&dtc=C%s&rfc=C%s&rtc=C%s&dd=%s&rd=%s&px=1000&ns=0&prc=&rng=1&rbd=0&ct=0" % (dep_airport, arr_airport, arr_airport, dep_airport, dep_date, arr_date)
driver.maximize_window()
driver.get(url)

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 60)
wait.until(EC.invisibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, '//img[contains(@src, "loading")]')))
wait.until(EC.invisibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH,
                                               u'//div[. = "Poprosíme o trpezlivosť, hľadáme pre Vás ešte viac letov"]/preceding-sibling::img')))

while True:  # TODO: make the endless loop end
    results = driver.find_elements_by_css_selector("div.flightbox")
    print "Results count: %d" % len(results)

    # scroll to the last element
    driver.execute_script("arguments[0].scrollIntoView();", results[-1])

    # wait for more results to load
    wait.until(wait_for_more_than_n_elements((By.CSS_SELECTOR, 'div.flightbox'), len(results)))

Notes:

• you would need to figure out when to stop the loop - for example, at a particular len(results) value
• wait_for_more_than_n_elements is a custom Expected Condition which helps to identify when the next portion is loaded and we can scroll again