Selenium Basics

Selenium is a browser automation tool that controls real browsers. It's essential for scraping JavaScript-heavy websites.

Installing Selenium

pip install selenium webdriver-manager

Creating a WebDriver

Headless Mode

Navigating Pages

Finding Elements

Extracting Data

Waiting for Content

Common Wait Conditions

Complete Scraping Example

Error Handling

Key Takeaways

• Selenium controls real browsers to handle JavaScript
• Use headless mode for server environments and faster scraping
• webdriver-manager handles driver installation automatically
• Use explicit waits to wait for content to load
• find_element returns one element; find_elements returns a list
• Always close the driver with driver.quit() in a finally block
• Selenium is slower than requests but handles dynamic content