When scraping we might notice that some page elements are only visible in the web browser but not in our scraper. This is called dynamic javascript data and it's being created by javascript on page load. If our scraper is not running a full browser to execut javascript it'll never see dynamic elements rendered.
There are many ways to scrape dynamic data like using web browsers:
How to Scrape Dynamic Websites Using Headless Web Browsers
Introduction to using web automation tools such as Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium and ScrapFly to render dynamic websites for web scraping
Alternatively, sometimes dynamic data is already present in the HTML document but in a different location than what we see in the browser. Most commonly the data is hidden in <script> elements as javascript variables and then unpacked into the HTML on page load.
How to Scrape Hidden Web Data
The visible HTML doesn't always represent the whole dataset available on the page. In this article, we'll be taking a look at scraping of hidden web data. What is it and how can we scrape it using Python?
