


They simply weren’t made to deal with dynamically created content.

While tools like requests and BeautifulSoup excel at extracting data from static sites, they struggle when it comes to dynamic or reactive sites that involve a lot of JS on the UI made with frameworks such as ReactJS, AngularJS, or VueJS. This is typically preferable for tasks like web automation, automated testing, and web scraping, as it significantly reduces the load time of the browser and the computation power required since all the work is being done in the background. Headless mode simply refers to running the web browser in the background without the graphical user interface (GUI). It works similarly to Selenium, supporting both headless and non-headless mode, though Pyppeteer’s native support is limited to JavaScript and Chromium browsers. Pyppeteer is a Python wrapper for the JavaScript (Node) library, Puppeteer. In this article, you’ll learn about another powerful alternative, Pyppeteer, and explore how to get started with it as a Python developer.

Some of the most popular options include requests, BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, MechanicalSoup, lxml, and selenium. There are a number of tools and libraries in Python for web scraping. Thanks to browser automation, which emulates human actions such as clicking and scrolling through a web system, users can simply and efficiently gather useful data without being hindered by a manual process. The process of web scraping can be a helpful solution, programmatically extracting data from the web. Extracting this data manually, page by page, can be a very slow and time consuming process. With the rise of trends such as big data and data science, data has become more useful than ever, being used to train machine learning algorithms, generate insights, forecast the future, and many other purposes. The web acts like a giant, powerful database, with tons of data being generated every single day.
