Newbie: How To Overcome Javascript "onclick" Button To Scrape Web Page?

This is the link I want to scrape: http://www.prudential.com.hk/PruServlet?module=fund&purpose=searchHistFund&fundCd=MMFU_U The 'English Version' tab is at the upper right

Solution 1:

You cannot just click the link inside scrapy (see Click a Button in Scrapy).

First of all, check if the data you need is already there - in the html (it is on the background - so it's there).

Another option is selenium:

from selenium import webdriver
import time

browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get("http://www.prudential.com.hk/PruServlet?module=fund&purpose=searchHistFund&fundCd=MMFU_U")

elem = browser.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="disclaimer"]/div/div')
elem.click()
time.sleep(0.2)

elem = browser.find_element_by_xpath("//*")
print elem.get_attribute("outerHTML")

One more option is to use mechanize. It cannot execute js code, but, according to the source code, AgreeClick just sets the cookie ListFundShowDisclaimer to true. This is a starting point (not sure if it works):

import cookielib
import mechanize

br = mechanize.Browser()

cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
ck = cookielib.Cookie(version=0, name='ListFundShowDisclaimer', value='true', port=None, port_specified=False,
                      domain='www.prudential.com.hk', domain_specified=False, domain_initial_dot=False, path='/',
                      path_specified=True, secure=False, expires=None, discard=True, comment=None, comment_url=None,
                      rest={'HttpOnly': None}, rfc2109=False)
cj.set_cookie(ck)
br.set_cookiejar(cj)

br.open("http://www.prudential.com.hk/PruServlet?module=fund&purpose=searchHistFund&fundCd=MMFU_U")
print br.response().read()

Then, you can parse the result with BeautifulSoup or whatever you prefer.

Solution 2:

Use the spynner library for Python to emulate a browser and execute the client-side javascript.

import spynner

browser = spynner.Browser()
url = "http://www.prudential.com/path/?args=values"

browser.load(url)

browser.runjs("AgreeClick();")

markup = browser._get_html()

As you can see, you can invoke any Javascript function available in the source of the page programmatically.

If you also need to parse results, I highly recommend BeautifulSoup.