Why does search results not showing up when web scraping bus schedules?

confused_certainties 0
Viewed 62

I want to scrape the bus schedule times from the following website https://www.redbus.in/. By putting the locations I am interested in the search fields I arrive at the following link which is an example of ones I am interested in: https://www.redbus.in/bus-tickets/bhopal-to-indore?fromCityName=Bhopal&fromCityId=979&toCityName=Indore&toCityId=313&onward=18-Sep-2022&srcCountry=IND&destCountry=IND&opId=0&busType=Any

When I manually save this page and open the HTML file I can find the search results including Bus operator names, departure times, fare etc. But when I do the same using Python that part of the page is not saved. The code I am using is the following:

from selenium import webdriver
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "https://www.redbus.in/bus-tickets/bhopal-to-indore?fromCityName=Bhopal&fromCityId=979&toCityName=Indore&toCityId=313&onward=18-Sep-2022&srcCountry=IND&destCountry=IND&opId=0&busType=Any"

browser = webdriver.Chrome()
browser.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(browser.page_source)
browser.quit()

soup object that is created this way has all the other content of the page in HTML format except the search results showing the bus route and time information. I am not sure why that is the case. I am new to web scrapping so any help here will be really appreciated.

beautifulsoup web-scraping selenium python
2 Answers

Main issue is that the data you expect needs a moment to be loaded and rendered by the browser - so simplest way is to give some time.sleep() or better selenium waits for second or two.

from selenium import webdriver
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import time

url = "https://www.redbus.in/bus-tickets/bhopal-to-indore?fromCityName=Bhopal&fromCityId=979&toCityName=Indore&toCityId=313&onward=18-Sep-2022&srcCountry=IND&destCountry=IND&opId=0&busType=Any"

browser = webdriver.Chrome()
browser.get(url)
time.sleep(2)
soup = BeautifulSoup(browser.page_source)
browser.quit()

But selenium is not necessarry, you can also access the JSON with all the data via requests and this is all well structured:

import requests
import json

url = "https://www.redbus.in/search/SearchResults?"

headers = {
  'content-type': 'application/json',
  'origin': 'https://www.redbus.in',
  'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'
}

data={
    'fromCity':979,
    'toCity':313,
    'src':'Bhopal',
    'dst':'Indore',
    'DOJ':'20-Sep-2022',
    'sectionId':0,
    'groupId':0,
    'limit':0,
    'offset':0,
    'sort':0,
    'sortOrder':0,
    'meta':'true',
    'returnSearch':0}

response = requests.request("POST", url, params=data, headers=headers)

[e['bpData'] for e in response.json()['inv']]

Output

[[{'Id': 23400197,
   'Name': 'ISBT Bhopal (Verma Travels)',
   'Vbpname': 'ISBT Bhopal (Verma Travels)',
   'BpTm': '07:00',
   'bpTminmin': 420,
   'eta': None,
   'Address': 'ISBT Bhopal (Verma Travels)',
   'BpFullTime': '2022-09-18 07:00:00'},
  {'Id': 23400198,
   'Name': 'Bhopal Railway Station (Verma Travels) (Pickup Van)',
   'Vbpname': 'Bhopal Railway Station (Verma Travels) (Pickup Van)',
   'BpTm': '07:00',
   'bpTminmin': 420,
   'eta': None,
   'Address': 'Bhopal Railway Station (Verma Travels) (Pickup Van)',
   'BpFullTime': '2022-09-18 07:00:00'},
  {'Id': 23400196,
   'Name': 'Lalghati (Verma Travels)',
   'Vbpname': 'Lalghati (Verma Travels)',
   'BpTm': '07:30',
   'bpTminmin': 450,
   'eta': None,
   'Address': 'Lalghati (Verma Travels)',
   'BpFullTime': '2022-09-18 07:30:00'},
  {'Id': 23408191,
   'Name': 'Sehore Bypass (Near Crescent Hotel)',
   'Vbpname': 'Sehore Bypass (Near Crescent Hotel)',
   'BpTm': '08:10',
   'bpTminmin': 490,
   'eta': None,
   'Address': 'Sehore Bypass (Near Crescent Hotel)',
   'BpFullTime': '2022-09-18 08:10:00'}],
 [{'Id': 23400197,
   'Name': 'ISBT Bhopal (Verma Travels) (Pickup Van)',
   'Vbpname': 'ISBT Bhopal (Verma Travels) (Pickup Van)',
   'BpTm': '18:30',
   'bpTminmin': 1110,
   'eta': None,
   'Address': 'ISBT Bhopal (Verma Travels) (Pickup Van)',
   'BpFullTime': '2022-09-18 18:30:00'},
  {'Id': 23400198,
   'Name': 'Bhopal Railway Station (Verma Travels) (Pickup Van)',
   'Vbpname': 'Bhopal Railway Station (Verma Travels) (Pickup Van)',
   'BpTm': '18:30',
   'bpTminmin': 1110,
   'eta': None,
   'Address': 'Bhopal Railway Station (Verma Travels) (Pickup Van)',
   'BpFullTime': '2022-09-18 18:30:00'},
  {'Id': 23400196,
   'Name': 'Lalghati (Verma Travels)',
   'Vbpname': 'Lalghati (Verma Travels)',
   'BpTm': '19:00',
   'bpTminmin': 1140,
   'eta': None,
   'Address': 'Lalghati (Verma Travels)',
   'BpFullTime': '2022-09-18 19:00:00'},
  {'Id': 23408191,
   'Name': 'Sehore Bypass (Near Crescent Hotel)',
   'Vbpname': 'Sehore Bypass (Near Crescent Hotel)',
   'BpTm': '19:40',
   'bpTminmin': 1180,
   'eta': None,
   'Address': 'Sehore Bypass (Near Crescent Hotel)',
   'BpFullTime': '2022-09-18 19:40:00'}],...]
HedgeHog0

You don't need to use selenium or soup. Sometimes you can use only the 'requests' module and check if there is an api that sends you a response.(You can do this via network tab of your browser).

For example the site you want to scrap, it seems that there is one api. So you take a look and understand how to their api works and you send a request exactly the same way and get the json response and then you parse it.

alicanyuksel0
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