Hallo guys!
Sorry for the dump question, this is my last resort. I swear i triend countless of other Stackoverflow questions, different Frameworks, etc., but those didnt seem to help.
Ich have the following Problem:
A website displays a list of data (there is a TON of div, li, span etc. tags infront, its a big HTML.)
Im writing a tool that fetches data from a specific list inside a ton of other div tags, downloads it and outputs an excel file.
The website im trying to access, is dynamic. So you open the website, it loads a little bit, and then the list appears (probably some JS and stuff).
When i try to download the website via a webRequest in C#, the html I get ist almost empty with a ton on white spaces, lots of non-html stuff, some garbage data as well.
Now: Im pretty used to C#, HTMLAgillityPack, and countless other libraries, not so much in web related stuff tho. I tried CefSharp, Chromium etc. all of those stuff, but couldnt get them to work properly unfortunately.
I want to have a HTML in my program to work with that looks exactly like the HTML that you see when
you open the dev console in chrome wenn visting the website mentined above.
The HTML parser works flwalessly there.
This is how I image how the code could look like simplified.
Extreme C# pseudocode:
WebBrowserEngine web = new WebBrowserEngine()
web.LoadURLuntilFinished(url); // with all the JS executed and stuff
String html = web.getHTML();
web.close();
My Goal would be that the string html in the pseudocode looks exactly like the one in the Chrome dev tab.
Maybe there is a solution posted somewhere else but i swear i coudlnt find it, been looking for days.
Andy help is greatly appreciated.
#SpencerBench is spot on in saying
It could be that the page is using some combination of scroll state, element visibility, or element positions to trigger content loading. If that's the case, then you'll need to figure out what it is and trigger it programmatically.
To answer the question for your specific use case, we need to understand the behaviour of the page you want to scrape data from, or as I asked in the comments, how do you know the page is "finished"?
However, it's possible to give a fairly generic answer to the question which should act as a starting point for you.
This answer uses Selenium, a package which is commonly used for automating testing of web UIs, but as they say on their home page, that's not the only thing it can be used for.
Primarily it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should) also be automated as well.
The web site I'm scraping
So first we need a web site. I've created one using ASP.net core MVC with .net core 3.1, although the web site's technology stack isn't important, it's the behaviour of the page you want to scrape which is important. This site has 2 pages, unimaginatively called Page1 and Page2.
Page controllers
There's nothing special in these controllers:
namespace StackOverflow68925623Website.Controllers
{
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc;
public class Page1Controller : Controller
{
public IActionResult Index()
{
return View("Page1");
}
}
}
namespace StackOverflow68925623Website.Controllers
{
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc;
public class Page2Controller : Controller
{
public IActionResult Index()
{
return View("Page2");
}
}
}
API controller
There's also an API controller (i.e. it returns data rather than a view) which the views can call asynchronously to get some data to display. This one just creates an array of the requested number of random strings.
namespace StackOverflow68925623Website.Controllers
{
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
[Route("api/[controller]")]
[ApiController]
public class DataController : ControllerBase
{
[HttpGet("Create")]
public IActionResult Create(int numberOfElements)
{
var response = new List<string>();
for (var i = 0; i < numberOfElements; i++)
{
response.Add(RandomString(10));
}
return Ok(response);
}
private string RandomString(int length)
{
var sb = new StringBuilder();
var random = new Random();
for (var i = 0; i < length; i++)
{
var characterCode = random.Next(65, 90); // A-Z
sb.Append((char)characterCode);
}
return sb.ToString();
}
}
}
Views
Page1's view looks like this:
#{
ViewData["Title"] = "Page 1";
}
<div class="text-center">
<div id="list" />
<script src="~/lib/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
var apiUrl = 'https://localhost:44394/api/Data/Create';
$(document).ready(function () {
$('#list').append('<li id="loading">Loading...</li>');
$.ajax({
url: apiUrl + '?numberOfElements=20000',
datatype: 'json',
success: function (data) {
$('#loading').remove();
var insert = ''
for (var item of data) {
insert += '<li>' + item + '</li>';
}
insert = '<ul id="results">' + insert + '</ul>';
$('#list').html(insert);
},
error: function (xht, status) {
alert('Error: ' + status);
}
});
});
</script>
</div>
So when the page first loads, it just contains an empty div called list, however the page loading trigger's the function passed to jQuery's $(document).ready function, which makes an asynchronous call to the API controller, requesting an array of 20,000 elements. While the call is in progress, "Loading..." is displayed on the screen, and when the call returns, this is replaced by an unordered list containing the received data. This is written in a way intended to be friendly to developers of automated UI tests, or of screen scrapers, because we can tell whether all the data has loaded by testing whether or not the page contains an element with the ID results.
Page2's view looks like this:
#{
ViewData["Title"] = "Page 2";
}
<div class="text-center">
<div id="list">
<ul id="results" />
</div>
<script src="~/lib/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
var apiUrl = 'https://localhost:44394/api/Data/Create';
var requestCount = 0;
var maxRequests = 20;
$(document).ready(function () {
getData();
});
function getDataIfAtBottomOfPage() {
console.log("scroll - " + requestCount + " requests");
if (requestCount < maxRequests) {
console.log("scrollTop " + document.documentElement.scrollTop + " scrollHeight " + document.documentElement.scrollHeight);
if (document.documentElement.scrollTop > (document.documentElement.scrollHeight - window.innerHeight - 100)) {
getData();
}
}
}
function getData() {
window.onscroll = undefined;
requestCount++;
$('results2').append('<li id="loading">Loading...</li>');
$.ajax({
url: apiUrl + '?numberOfElements=50',
datatype: 'json',
success: function (data) {
var insert = ''
for (var item of data) {
insert += '<li>' + item + '</li>';
}
$('#loading').remove();
$('#results').append(insert);
if (requestCount < maxRequests) {
window.setTimeout(function () { window.onscroll = getDataIfAtBottomOfPage }, 1000);
} else {
$('#results').append('<li>That\'s all folks');
}
},
error: function (xht, status) {
alert('Error: ' + status);
}
});
}
</script>
</div>
This gives a nicer user experience because it requests data from the API controller in multiple smaller chunks, so the first chunk of data appears fairly quickly, and once the user has scrolled down to somewhere near the bottom of the page, the next chunk of data is requested, until 20 chunks have been requested and displayed, at which point the text "That's all folks" is added to the end of the unordered list. However this is more difficult to interact with programmatically because you need to scroll the page down to make the new data appear.
(Yes, this implementation is a bit buggy - if the user gets to the bottom of the page too quickly then requesting the next chunk of data doesn't happen until they scroll up a bit. But the question isn't about how to implement this behaviour in a web page, but about how to scrape the displayed data, so please forgive my bugs.)
The scraper
I've implemented the scraper as a xUnit unit test project, just because I'm not doing anything with the data I've scraped from the web site other than Asserting that it is of the correct length, and therefore proving that I haven't prematurely assumed that the web page I'm scraping from is "finished". You can put most of this code (other than the Asserts) into any type of project.
Having created your scraper project, you need to add the Selenium.WebDriver and Selenium.WebDriver.ChromeDriver nuget packages.
Page Object Model
I'm using the Page Object Model pattern to provide a layer of abstraction between functional interaction with the page and the implementation detail of how to code that interaction. Each of the pages in the web site has a corresponding page model class for interacting with that page.
First, a base class with some code which is common to more than one page model class.
namespace StackOverflow68925623Scraper
{
using System;
using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Support.UI;
public class PageModel
{
protected PageModel(IWebDriver driver)
{
this.Driver = driver;
}
protected IWebDriver Driver { get; }
public void ScrollToTop()
{
var js = (IJavaScriptExecutor)this.Driver;
js.ExecuteScript("window.scrollTo(0, 0)");
}
public void ScrollToBottom()
{
var js = (IJavaScriptExecutor)this.Driver;
js.ExecuteScript("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight)");
}
protected IWebElement GetById(string id)
{
try
{
return this.Driver.FindElement(By.Id(id));
}
catch (NoSuchElementException)
{
return null;
}
}
protected IWebElement AwaitGetById(string id)
{
var wait = new WebDriverWait(Driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10));
return wait.Until(e => e.FindElement(By.Id(id)));
}
}
}
This base class gives us 4 convenience methods:
Scroll to the top of the page
Scroll to the bottom of the page
Get the element with the supplied ID, or return null if it doesn't exist
Get the element with the supplied ID, or wait for up to 10 seconds for it to appear if it doesn't exist yet
And each page in the web site has its own model class, derived from that base class.
namespace StackOverflow68925623Scraper
{
using OpenQA.Selenium;
public class Page1Model : PageModel
{
public Page1Model(IWebDriver driver) : base(driver)
{
}
public IWebElement AwaitResults => this.AwaitGetById("results");
public void Navigate()
{
this.Driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://localhost:44394/Page1");
}
}
}
namespace StackOverflow68925623Scraper
{
using OpenQA.Selenium;
public class Page2Model : PageModel
{
public Page2Model(IWebDriver driver) : base(driver)
{
}
public IWebElement Results => this.GetById("results");
public void Navigate()
{
this.Driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://localhost:44394/Page2");
}
}
}
And the Scraper class:
namespace StackOverflow68925623Scraper
{
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;
using System;
using System.Threading;
using Xunit;
public class Scraper
{
[Fact]
public void TestPage1()
{
// Arrange
var driver = new ChromeDriver();
var page = new Page1Model(driver);
page.Navigate();
try
{
// Act
var actualResults = page.AwaitResults.Text.Split(Environment.NewLine);
// Assert
Assert.Equal(20000, actualResults.Length);
}
finally
{
// Ensure the browser window closes even if things go pear-shaped
driver.Quit();
}
}
[Fact]
public void TestPage2()
{
// Arrange
var driver = new ChromeDriver();
var page = new Page2Model(driver);
page.Navigate();
try
{
// Act
while (!page.Results.Text.Contains("That's all folks"))
{
Thread.Sleep(1000);
page.ScrollToBottom();
page.ScrollToTop();
}
var actualResults = page.Results.Text.Split(Environment.NewLine);
// Assert - we expect 1001 because of the extra "that's all folks"
Assert.Equal(1001, actualResults.Length);
}
finally
{
// Ensure the browser window closes even if things go pear-shaped
driver.Quit();
}
}
}
}
So, what's happening here?
// Arrange
var driver = new ChromeDriver();
var page = new Page1Model(driver);
page.Navigate();
ChromeDriver is in the Selenium.WebDriver.ChromeDriver package and implements the IWebDriver interface from the Selenium.WebDriver package with the code to interact with the Chrome browser. Other packages are available containing implementations for all popular browsers. Instantiating the driver object opens a browser window, and calling its Navigate method directs the browser to the page we want to test/scrape.
// Act
var actualResults = page.AwaitResults.Text.Split(Environment.NewLine);
Because on Page1, the results element doesn't exist until all the data has been displayed, and no user interaction is required in order for it to be displayed, we use the page model's AwaitResults property to just wait for that element to appear and return it once it has appeared.
AwaitResults returns an IWebElement instance representing the element, which in turn has various methods and properties we can use to interact with the element. In this case we use its Text property which returns the element's contents as a string, without any markup. Because the data is displayed as an unordered list, each element in the list is delimited by a line break, so we can can use String's Split method to convert it to a string array.
Page2 needs a different approach - we can't use the presence of the results element to determine whether the data has all been displayed, because that element is on the page right from the start, instead we need to check for the string "That's all folks" which is written right at the end of the last chunk of data. Also the data isn't loaded all in one go, and we need to keep scrolling down in order to trigger the loading of the next chunk of data.
// Act
while (!page.Results.Text.Contains("That's all folks"))
{
Thread.Sleep(1000);
page.ScrollToBottom();
page.ScrollToTop();
}
var actualResults = page.Results.Text.Split(Environment.NewLine);
Because of the bug in the UI that I mentioned earlier, if we get to the bottom of the page too quickly, the fetch of the next chunk of data isn't triggered, and attempting to scroll down when already at the bottom of the page doesn't raise another scroll event. That's why I'm scrolling to the bottom of the page and then back to the top - that way I can guarantee that a scroll event is raised. You never know, the web site you're trying to scrape data from may itself be buggy.
Once the "That's all folks" text has appeared, we can go ahead and get the results element's Text property and convert it to a string array as before.
// Assert - we expect 1001 because of the extra "that's all folks"
Assert.Equal(1001, actualResults.Length);
This is the bit that won't be in your code. Because I'm scraping a web site which is under my control, I know exactly how much data it should be displaying so I can check that I've got all the data, and therefore that my scraping code is working correctly.
Further reading
Absolute beginner's introduction to Selenium: https://www.guru99.com/selenium-csharp-tutorial.html
(A curiosity in that article is the way that it starts by creating a console application project and later changes its output type to class library and manually adds the unit test packages, when the project could have been created using one of Visual Studio's unit test project templates. It gets to the right place in the end, albeit via a rather odd route.)
Selenium documentation: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/
Happy scraping!
If you need to fully execute the web page, then a complete browser like CefSharp is your only option.
It could be that the page is using some combination of scroll state, element visibility, or element positions to trigger content loading. If that's the case, then you'll need to figure out what it is and trigger it programmatically. I know that CefSharp can simulate user actions like clicking, scrolling, etc.
I have following problem: I wrote a HTML-Code which shows a variable List as table when I press the Button. I did so far, that the table get showed in PDF in a Print Service. But the table has some sort functions and on a PDF one can't use them. So I try to show the HTML as a Website in Webview in the App, where one can use the function. The code for the code behind is the following:
public ICommand PrintCommand => new AsyncCommand(Print);
private async Task Print()
{
// New up the Razor template and set the model property
var printTemplate = new ListPrintTemplate
{
Model = FilteredList,
};
// Generate the HTML
var htmlString = printTemplate.GenerateString();
// Create a source for the webview
var htmlSource = new HtmlWebViewSource{ Html = htmlString };
// Create and populate the Xamarin.Forms.WebView
var browser = new WebView { Source = htmlSource };
var printService = Xamarin.Forms.DependencyService.Get<IPrintService>();
printService.Print(browser, $"{Res.Probe}-{FilteredList}");
}
I have still the printService in the last lines. I looked over the libraries and the Microsoft documentation but can't help myself.
Edit: Sorry - now that I've understood the problem a bit better, I think my problem lies elsewhere
I have 2 asynchronus requests.
The first is this:
public void DownloadWebData(Uri apiUrl)
{
WebClient client = new WebClient();
client.DownloadDataCompleted += DownloadDataCompleted;
client.DownloadDataAsync(apiUrl);
}
public void DownloadDataCompleted(object sender, DownloadDataCompletedEventArgs e)
{
string result = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString (e.Result);
Uri downloadLink = (GetUri(result));
}
Basically it makes a simple url based API request to a remote webserver which returns some basic textual data over http. GetUri() just parses that data to extract an address from the data for an image to download.
I'm then using imageLoader in monotouch.dialog to download the image. All code is in the same class.
Edit: added the imageLoader code (I left the Console lines in because they serve reasonably well as comments).
public void downloadImage (Uri imageUri)
{
var tmp_img = ImageLoader.DefaultRequestImage (imageUri, this);
if (tmp_img != null)
{
adView.Image = tmp_img;
Console.WriteLine ("Image already cached, displaying");
}
else
{
adView.Image = UIImage.FromFile ("Images/downloading.jpg");
Console.WriteLine ("Image not cached. Using placeholder.");
}
}
public void UpdatedImage (System.Uri uri)
{
adView.Image = ImageLoader.DefaultRequestImage(uri, this);
}
You missed to check if e.Result actually contains something. The download might as well have failed and e.Result is null. Add some basic error handling to your code.
if you are using DownloadWebData inside a for loop, it will be better you generate seperate functions for DownloadDataCompleted event.
You can use anonymous function inside DownloadWebData().
client.DownloadDataCompleted +=(s,e)=>{
string result = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString (e.Result);
Uri downloadLink = (GetUri(result));
};
After realizing I was asking the wrong question, I finally figured it out here:
Hand back control to main UI thread to update UI after asynchronus image download
The code works, but I can not get the exact link to the page, and that way I do not return anything, it returns an exception that happens because the path does not find anything. The page is as follows, and I need to get the video that this path at the "SelectSingleNode".
please help me to build the correct XPath to get the link of the video from youtube.
My source code:
private void DownloadCompleted(object sender, HtmlDocumentLoadCompleted e)
{
var data = e.Document.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//html/head/link")
.Attributes["href"].Value.ToString();
MessageBox.Show(data);
Uri obj = new Uri(data);
Web.Source = obj;
Web.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;
}
If you click "Inspect Element" on this page, you will find the youtube link that way I describe in "SelectSingleNode". I just left there so you can find the link and help me, but that string is not correct.
This code gets another link. I need to get the real link of youtube video. I try this XPath string but now works: "//html/body/div/iframe/html/head"
There are multiple child LINK elements in the HEAD. You need to identify via the which one you want, similar to this: e.Document.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//html/head/link[#id='someId']")
How about //iframe[contains(#src, "youtube")]//link[#rel="canonical"]?
Returns <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byp94CCWKSI"/>.
I am guessing based off of the method signature that you are using HtmlAgilityPack... which does not retrieve the content of IFrames. You will need to issue a separate request for the content of the IFrame:
var hwMainPage = new HtmlWeb();
var hdMainPage = hwMainPage.Load(#"http://www.unnu.com/jason-derulo/the-other-side");
var iframeUri = hdMainPage.DocumentNode
.SelectSingleNode("//iframe[contains(#src, \"youtube\")]")
.Attributes["src"].Value;
var hwIframe = new HtmlWeb();
var hdIframe = hwIframe.Load(iframeUri);
var videoCanonicalUri = hdIframe.DocumentNode
.SelectSingleNode("//link[#rel=\"canonical\"]")
.Attributes["href"].Value;
// videoCanonicalUri == http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byp94CCWKSI
Good day
I have question about displaying html documents in a windows forms applications. App that I'm working on should display information from the
database in the html format. I will try to describe actions that I have taken (and which failed):
1) I tried to load "virtual" html page that exists only in memory and dynamically change it's parameters (webbMain is a WebBrowser control):
public static string CreateBookHtml()
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
//Declaration
sb.AppendLine(#"<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""utf-8""?>");
sb.AppendLine(#"<?xml-stylesheet type=""text/css"" href=""style.css""?>");
sb.AppendLine(#"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ""-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN""
""http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"">");
sb.AppendLine(#"<html xmlns=""http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"" xml:lang=""en"">");
//Head
sb.AppendLine(#"<head>");
sb.AppendLine(#"<title>Exemplary document</title>");
sb.AppendLine(#"<meta http-equiv=""Content-Type"" content=""application/xhtml+xml;
charset=utf-8""/ >");
sb.AppendLine(#"</head>");
//Body
sb.AppendLine(#"<body>");
sb.AppendLine(#"<p id=""paragraph"">Example.</p>");
sb.AppendLine(#"</body>");
sb.AppendLine(#"</html>");
return sb.ToString();
}
void LoadBrowser()
{
this.webbMain.Navigate("about:blank");
this.webbMain.DocumentText = CreateBookHtml();
HtmlDocument doc = this.webbMain.Document;
}
This failed, because doc.Body is null, and doc.getElementById("paragraph") returns null too. So I cannot change paragraph InnerText property.
Furthermore, this.webbMain.DocumentText is "\0"...
2) I tried to create html file in specified folder, load it to the WebBrowser and then change its parameters. Html is the same as created by
CreateBookHtml() method:
private void LoadBrowser()
{
this.webbMain.Navigate("HTML\\BookPage.html"));
HtmlDocument doc = this.webbMain.Document;
}
This time this.webbMain.DocumentText contains Html data read from the file, but doc.Body returns null again, and I still cannot take element using
getByElementId() method. Of course, when I have text, I would try regex to get specified fields, or maybe do other tricks to achieve a goal, but I wonder - is there simply way to mainipulate html? For me, ideal way would be to create HTML text in memory, load it into the WebBrowser control, and then dynamically change its parameters using IDs. Is it possible? Thanks for the answers in advance, best regards,
Paweł
I've worked some time ago with the WebControl and like you wanted to load a html from memory but have the same problem, body being null. After some investigation, I noticed that the Navigate and NavigateToString methods work asynchronously, so it needs a little time for the control to load the document, the document is not available right after the call to Navigate. So i did something like (wbChat is the WebBrowser control):
wbChat.NavigateToString("<html><body><div>first line</div></body><html>");
DoEvents();
where DoEvents() is implemeted as:
[SecurityPermissionAttribute(SecurityAction.Demand, Flags = SecurityPermissionFlag.UnmanagedCode)]
public void DoEvents()
{
DispatcherFrame frame = new DispatcherFrame();
Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Background,
new DispatcherOperationCallback(ExitFrame), frame);
Dispatcher.PushFrame(frame);
}
and it worked for me, after the DoEvents call, I could obtain a non-null body:
mshtml.IHTMLDocument2 doc2 = (mshtml.IHTMLDocument2)wbChat.Document;
mshtml.HTMLDivElement div = (mshtml.HTMLDivElement)doc2.createElement("div");
div.innerHTML = "some text";
mshtml.HTMLBodyClass body = (mshtml.HTMLBodyClass)doc2.body;
if (body != null)
{
body.appendChild((mshtml.IHTMLDOMNode)div);
body.scrollTop = body.scrollHeight;
}
else
Console.WriteLine("body is still null");
I don't know if this is the right way of doing this, but it fixed the problem for me, maybe it helps you too.
Later Edit:
public object ExitFrame(object f)
{
((DispatcherFrame)f).Continue = false;
return null;
}
The DoEvents method is necessary on WPF. For System.Windows.Forms one can use Application.DoEvents().
Another way to do the same thing is:
webBrowser1.DocumentText = "<html><body>blabla<hr/>yadayada</body></html>";
this works without any extra initialization