Comment by mdaniel 2 days ago
> Finic uses Playwright to interact with DOM elements, and recommends BeautifulSoup for HTML parsing.
I have never, ever understood anyone who goes to the trouble of booting up a browser, and then uses a python library to do static HTML parsing
Anyway, I was surfing around the repo trying to find what, exactly "Safely store and access credentials using Finic’s built-in secret manager" means
Often times websites won't load the HTML without executing the JavaScript. or uses JavaScript running client side to generate the entire page.
In this specific scenario, where the project is using *automated Chrome* to even bother with the connection, redirects, and bazillions of other "browser-y" things to arrive at HTML to be parsed, the very idea that one would `soup = BeautifulSoup(playright.content())` is crazypants to me
I am open to the fact that html5lib strives to parse correctly, and good for them, but that would be the case where one wished to use python for parsing to avoid the pitfalls of dragging a native binary around with you
I think there's some misunderstanding? Sometimes parsing HTML is the best way to get what you need, however there are many situations where one must use something like playwright to get the HTML in the first place (for example, the html is generated clientside by javascript). What's the better alternative?
Yes, there is for sure some misunderstanding. Of course parsing HTML is the best way to get what you need in a thread about screen scraping using browser automation. And if the target site is the modern bloatware of <html><body><script src=/17gigabytes.js></script></body></html> then for sure one needs a browser (or equivalent) to solve that problem
What I'm saying is that doing the equivalent of
chrome.exe --dump-html https://example.com/lol \
| python -c "import bs4; print('reevaluate life choices that led you here')"
In python specifically I like lxml (pretty sure that's what BS uses under the hood?), parse5 if you're using node is usually my go to. Ideally though you shouldn't really have to parse anything (or not much at all) when doing browser automation as you have access to the DOM which gives you an interface that accepts query selectors directly (you don't even need the Runtime domain for most of your needs).
> pretty sure that's what BS uses under the hood?
it's an option[1], and my strong advice is to not use lxml for html since html5lib[2] has the explicitly stated goal of being WHATWG compliant: https://github.com/html5lib/html5lib-python#html5lib
1: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/#insta...
We're in the middle of putting this together right now but it's going to be a wrapper around Google Secret Manager for those that don't want to set up a secrets manager themselves.