📅 2025-06-11 — Session: Enhanced Web Scraping with Selenium
🕒 08:20–09:20
🏷️ Labels: Selenium, Web Scraping, Python, Error Handling, Automation
📂 Project: Dev
⭐ Priority: MEDIUM
Session Goal
The primary objective of this session was to enhance web scraping capabilities using Selenium, focusing on robust error handling, timeout management, and process isolation.
Key Activities
- Fetched Content from Google News: Explored methods for fetching content using HTML scraping, RSS feed parsing, and discussed API limitations.
- Data Processing with Pandas: Developed a Python script for loading, concatenating, and deduplicating CSV files.
- Crawler Implementation: Structured a web crawler in Jupyter Notebook, emphasizing error handling and scalability.
- Selenium-Based Web Scraping: Analyzed and improved various Selenium scripts for web scraping, including:
- Implementing a minimal Selenium script for URL page source extraction.
- Updating scripts for better timeout handling and error management.
- Ensuring thread safety by creating separate WebDriver instances.
- Managing ChromeDriver processes effectively.
- Declaring options and driver in web scraping code for efficiency.
Achievements
- Developed a refined Selenium-based web scraping script with improved error handling and timeout management.
- Ensured robust thread safety and process isolation in web scraping tasks.
- Implemented best practices for Selenium driver management.
Pending Tasks
- Further testing of the enhanced Selenium scripts in different environments to ensure robustness.
- Exploration of additional web scraping tools and techniques for scalability and efficiency.