Web scraping an "onclick" object table on a website with python

Question

I am trying to scrape the data for this link: page.

If you click the up arrow you will notice the highlighted days in the month sections. Clicking on a highlighted day, a table with initiated tenders for that day will appear. All I need to do is get the data in each table for each highlighted day in the calendar. There might be one or more tenders (up to max of 7) per day.

Table appears on click

I have done some web scraping with bs4, however I think that this is a job for selenium (please, correct me if I am wrong) with which I am not very familiar.

So far, I have managed to find the arrow element by XPATH to navigate around the calendar and show me more months. After that I try clicking on a random day (in below code I clicked on 30.03.2020) upon which an html object called: "tenders-table cloned" appears in the html on inspect. The object name stays the same no matter what day you click on.

I am pretty stuck now, have tried to select by iterate and/or print what is inside that object table, it either says that object is not iterable or is None.

from selenium import webdriver

chrome_path = r"C:\Users\<name>\chromedriver.exe"
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_path)

driver.get("http://www.ibex.bg/bg/данни-за-пазара/централизиран-пазар-за-двустранни-договори/търговски-календар/")
driver.find_element_by_xpath("""//*[@id="content"]/div[3]/div/div[1]/div/i""").click()
driver.find_element_by_xpath("""//*[@id="content"]/div[3]/div/div[2]/div[1]/div[3]/table/tbody/tr[6]/td[1]""").click()

Please advice how I can proceed to extract the data from the table pop-up.

Answer 1

Well, i see there's no reason to use selenium for such case as it's will slow down your task.

The website is loaded with JavaScript event which render it's data dynamically once the page loads.

requests library will not be able to render JavaScript on the fly. so you can use selenium or requests_html. and indeed there's a lot of modules which can do that.

Now, we do have another option on the table, to track from where the data is rendered. I were able to locate the XHR request which is used to retrieve the data from the back-end API and render it to the users side.

You can get the XHR request by open Developer-Tools and check Network and check XHR/JS requests made depending of the type of call such as fetch

import requests
import json

data = {
    'from': '2020-1-01',
    'to': '2020-3-01'
}


def main(url):
    r = requests.post(url, data=data).json()
    print(json.dumps(r, indent=4)) # to see it in nice format.
    print(r.keys())


main("http://www.ibex.bg/ajax/tenders_ajax.php")

Because am just a lazy coder: I will do it in this way:

import requests
import re
import pandas as pd
import ast
from datetime import datetime

data = {
    'from': '2020-1-01',
    'to': '2020-3-01'
}


def main(url):
    r = requests.post(url, data=data).json()
    matches = set(re.findall(r"tender_date': '([^']*)'", str(r)))
    sort = (sorted(matches, key=lambda k: datetime.strptime(k, '%d.%m.%Y')))
    print(f"Available Dates: {sort}")
    opa = re.findall(r"({\'id.*?})", str(r))
    convert = [ast.literal_eval(x) for x in opa]
    df = pd.DataFrame(convert)
    print(df)
    df.to_csv("data.csv", index=False)


main("http://www.ibex.bg/ajax/tenders_ajax.php")

Output: view-online