I’ve just discovered selenium and my life has changed.
When a customer needs a part replaced, they send in shipping data. This data has to be entered into 3-4 different web forms and an email. This allows me to automate it all from a single form that has built in error checking so human mistakes are limited.
Company could probably automate this all in the backend but they won’t :shrug:
Using Selenium for this is probably overkill. You might be better off sending direct HTTP requests with your form data. This way you don’t actually have to spin up an entire browser to perform that simple operation for you.
That said, if it works - it works!
Everyone loves the idea of scraping, no one likes maintaining scrapers that break once a week because the CSS or HTML changed.
I loved scraping until my ip was blocked for botting lol. I know there’s ways around it it’s just work though
I successfully scraped millions of Amazon product listings simply by routing through TOR and cycling the exit node every 10 seconds.
I have totally no idea what these are about…
‘Scraping’ is the process of anonymously and programmatically collecting data from a webpage(s), often without the website’s permission and only limited to the content made publicly available. This is in contrast to using an API provided by the database owner which is limited by tokens, access volume, available end points etc.
Websites and services create APIs for programmers to use them. So Spotify has code that let’s you build a program that can use its features. But you need a token they give you after you sign up. The token can be revoked and used to monitor how much of their service you’re using. That way they can restrict if its too much.
Scraping is raw dogging the web slut you met at the cougar ranch who went home with you because you reminded her of her dog
Fuck, I think I’ve been doing it wrong and this meme gave me more things to learn than any YouTube video has
The sad part is that scrapping is often easier then using the api.
Much less beholden to arbitrary rules also. Way too many times companies will just up and lift their API access or push through restrictions. No ty, I’ll just access it myself then
API starter kit
- Outdated and unsupported and hasn’t been replaced yet but is the standard way to use the service.
- Lots of authorization tokens.
- The example in the docs doesn’t work (if there is one).
- You have no idea where the online tutorial got the information because it doesn’t have links to resources and the docs have barely anything even though its giant.
- Uses asynchronous programming to make it faster but its still much much slower then scrapping without asynchronous programming.
