What are the key differences between scraping static and dynamic websites?
The key difference between a dynamic webpage and a static one, which reflects in the scraping is the dynamic content. Anything with dynamicly loaded javascript will not appear in a static scraping.
Explain at least three techniques or best practices that can be employed to avoid getting blocked while scraping websites.
All these come down to the over-use of a website. Humans don’t load ever page on a consistent bases and traverse it in predictable ways. These factors all need to be programmed into a scraper to avoid being blocked. Moreover, if you can be identified via fingerprinting or a login, it makes it easier to detect odd behavior.
What is Playwright, and how does it assist in web scraping tasks? Provide an example of a use case where Playwright would be particularly beneficial.
Playwright allows for dynamic scraping via by working with a web browser (Chromium, Firefox, or Webkit). Moreover, it has the capacity to save dynamic content. If there is a webpage that updates with JavaScript content on page load via injeciton, this would be especially useful.
Describe the purpose of using Xpath in web scraping, and provide an example of an Xpath expression to select a specific HTML element from a webpage.
Xpath allows for identifying content via the tags in an HTML or XML document.
An example for selecting title text:
//h1/text() OR //h1/b/text()
How is AI changing the landscape of human verification requests.