Question

I’m doing a research about processing news texts on the internet. So, I’m writing a program to obtain and store news in a DB by the news url.

For instance, this is a random news url (spanish news website). So, I’m using BeautifulSoup to get the HTML content and after a little bit of simple process I have the news title, summary, content, category and more information about the news.

But, as you can see in the news I used in the example, there is also some “social networking” information (right side of the news image):

• number of recommendations (facebook)
• number of tweets (twitter)
• number of +1s (google+)

I would like to obtain these information too, so I tried to process the HTML content from that part but it’s not there! This is what I’ve done:

>>> import urllib
>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as Soup
>>> news = urllib.urlopen('http://elcomercio.pe/mundo/1396187/noticia-horror-eeuu-cinco-ninos-muertos-deja-tiroteo-escuela-religiosa')
>>> soup = Soup(news.read())
>>> sociales = soup.findAll('ul', {'class': 'sociales'})[0].findAll('li')
>>> len(sociales)
3

This is the HTML content of the Facebook part:

>>> sociales[0] # facebook
<li class="top">
<div class="fb-plg">
<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>(function(d, s, id) {
  var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
  if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;}
  js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
  js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=224939367568467";
  fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>
<div class="fb-like" data-href="http://elcomercio.pe/noticia/1396187/horror-eeuu-cinco-ninos-muertos-deja-tiroteo-escuela-religiosa" data-send="false" data-layout="box_count" data-width="70" data-show-faces="false" data-action="recommend"></div></div></li>

Twitter part:

>>> sociales[1] # twitter
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="elcomercio" data-lang="es">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script></li>

Google+ part:

>>> sociales[2] # google+
<li><script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js">
  {lang: 'es'}
</script><g:plusone size="tall"></g:plusone></li>

As you can see, the information I’m looking for is not included in the HTML content, I’m guessing it is obtained following those links with a sort of API.

So my question is: is there anyway I can obtain the information I’m looking for (number of facebook recommendations, number of tweets, number of +1s) from the HTML content of a certain news?

Answer 1

Here’s my solution. I’m posting it because maybe someday someone will have the same problem. I followed @Hoff advice and I used phantomjs.

So first I installed it (Linux, Windows or MacOS, doesn’t matter). You just have to be able to run it as a command in your prompt/console like:

phantomjs file.js

Here is the phantomjs installation guide.

Then, I made a simple script, that receives an url and returns a BeautifulSoup object (after executing all the javascript):

import os
import os.path
import hashlib
import subprocess
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

PHANTOM_DIR = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'phantom')

try:
    os.stat(PHANTOM_DIR)
except OSError:
    os.mkdir(PHANTOM_DIR)

PHANTOM_TEMPLATE = """var page = require('webpage').create();  
page.open('%(url)s', function (status) {
    if (status !== 'success') {
        console.log('Unable to access network');
    } else {
        var p = page.evaluate(function () {
            return document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML
        });
        console.log(p);
    }
    phantom.exit();
});"""

def get_executed_soup(url):
    """ Returns a BeautifulSoup object with the parsed HTML of the url
        passed, after executing all the scripts in it. """
    file_id = hashlib.md5(url).hexdigest()
    PHANTOM_ABS_PATH = os.path.join(PHANTOM_DIR, 'phantom%s.js' % file_id)
    OUTPUT_ABS_PATH = os.path.join(PHANTOM_DIR, 'output%s.html' % file_id)
    phantom = open(PHANTOM_ABS_PATH, 'w')
    phantom.write(PHANTOM_TEMPLATE % {'url': url})
    phantom.close()
    cmd = 'phantomjs ' + PHANTOM_ABS_PATH + ' > ' + OUTPUT_ABS_PATH
    stdout, stderr = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True).communicate()
    output = open(OUTPUT_ABS_PATH, 'r')
    soup = BeautifulSoup(output.read())
    output.close()
    os.remove(PHANTOM_ABS_PATH)
    os.remove(OUTPUT_ABS_PATH)
    return soup

That’s it!

PS: I’ve only tested on Linux, so if any of you try this on Windows and/or MacOS, please share your “experience”. Thanks 🙂

PS 2: I’ve tested in Windows too, works like a charm!

I also posted this in my personal blog 🙂