How to use selenium for webscraping google flights?

user_16729019 0
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I'm trying to pull the airline names and prices of a specific flight. I'm having trouble with the x.path and/or using the right html tags because when I run the code below, all I get back is 14 empty lists.

from selenium import webdriver
from lxml import html
from time import sleep

driver = webdriver.Chrome(r"C:\Users\14074\Python\chromedriver")
URL = 'https://www.google.com/travel/flights/searchtfs=CBwQAhopagwIAxIIL20vMHBseTASCjIwMjEtMTItMjNyDQgDEgkvbS8wMWYwOHIaKWoNCAMSCS9tLzAxZjA4chIKMjAyMS0xMi0yN3IMCAMSCC9tLzBwbHkwcAGCAQsI____________AUABSAGYAQE&tfu=EgYIAhAAGAA'

driver.get(URL)

sleep(1)

tree = html.fromstring(driver.page_source)

for flight_tree in tree.xpath('//div[@class="TQqf0e sSHqwe tPgKwe ogfYpf"]'):
     title = flight_tree.xpath('.//*[@id="yDmH0d"]/c-wiz[2]/div/div[2]/div/c-wiz/div/c-wiz/div[2]/div[2]/div/div[2]/div[6]/div/div[2]/div/div[1]/div/div[1]/div/div[2]/div[2]/div[2]/span/text()')
     price = flight_tree.xpath('.//span[contains(@data-gs, "CjR")]')

     print(title, price)
    
#driver.close()

This is just the first part of my code but I can't really continue without getting this to work. If anyone has some ideas on what I'm doing wrong that would be amazing! It's been driving me crazy. Thank you!

selenium-webdriver web-scraping selenium google-chrome python
2 Answers

I noticed a few issues with your code. First of all, I believe that when entering this page, first google will show you the "I agree to terms and conditions" popup before showing you the content of the page, therefore you need to first click on that button.

Also, you should use the find_elements_by_xpath function directly on driver instead of using the page content, as this also allows you to render the javascript content. You can find more info here: python tree.xpath return empty list

To get more info on how to scrape using selenium and python you could check out this guide: https://www.webscrapingapi.com/python-selenium-web-scraper/

I used the following code to scrape the titles. (I also changed the xpaths to do so, by extracting them directly from google chrome. You can do that by right clicking on an element -> inspect and in the elements tab where the element is, you can right click -> copy -> Copy xpath)

from selenium import webdriver
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager

# I used these for the code to work on my windows subsystem linux
option = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
option.add_argument('--no-sandbox') 
option.add_argument('--disable-dev-sh-usage')

driver = webdriver.Chrome(ChromeDriverManager().install(), options=option)
URL = 'https://www.google.com/travel/flights/searchtfs=CBwQAhopagwIAxIIL20vMHBseTASCjIwMjEtMTItMjNyDQgDEgkvbS8wMWYwOHIaKWoNCAMSCS9tLzAxZjA4chIKMjAyMS0xMi0yN3IMCAMSCC9tLzBwbHkwcAGCAQsI____________AUABSAGYAQE&tfu=EgYIAhAAGAA'

driver.get(URL)

driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="yDmH0d"]/c-wiz/div/div/div/div[2]/div[1]/div[4]/form/div[1]/div/button/span').click() # this is necessary to pres the I agree button

elements = driver.find_elements_by_xpath('//*[@id="yDmH0d"]/c-wiz[2]/div/div[2]/div/c-wiz/div/c-wiz/div[2]/div[3]/div[3]/c-wiz/div/div[2]/div[1]/div/div/ol/li')

for flight_tree in elements:
     title = flight_tree.find_element_by_xpath('.//*[@class="W6bZuc YMlIz"]').text

     print(title)
user_163419790

I tried the below code, with screen maximized and having explicit waits and could successfully extract the information, please see below :

Sample code :

driver = webdriver.Chrome(driver_path)
driver.maximize_window()
driver.get("https://www.google.com/travel/flights/searchtfs=CBwQAhopagwIAxIIL20vMHBseTASCjIwMjEtMTItMjNyDQgDEgkvbS8wMWYwOHIaKWoNCAMSCS9tLzAxZjA4chIKMjAyMS0xMi0yN3IMCAMSCC9tLzBwbHkwcAGCAQsI____________AUABSAGYAQE&tfu=EgYIAhAAGAA")
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
titles = wait.until(EC.presence_of_all_elements_located((By.XPATH, "//div/descendant::h3")))

for name in titles:
  print(name.text)
  price = name.find_element(By.XPATH, "./../following-sibling::div/descendant::span[2]").text
  print(price)

Imports :

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

Output :

Tokyo
₹38,473
Mumbai
₹3,515
Dubai
₹15,846
user_94440730
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