How to Scrape Google Maps
We'll take a look at to find businesses through Google Maps search system and how to scrape their details using either Selenium, Playwright or ScrapFly's javascript rendering feature - all of that in Python.
When web scraping using Playwright and Python to capture background requests and responses we can use the page.on()
method to add middleware callbacks on request and response events:
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
def intercept_request(request):
# we can update requests with custom headers
if "secret" in request.url :
request.headers['x-secret-token'] = "123"
print("patched headers of a secret request")
# or adjust sent data
if request.method == "POST":
request.post_data = "patched"
print("patched POST request")
return request
def intercept_response(response):
# we can extract details from background requests
if response.request.resource_type == "xhr":
print(response.headers.get('cookie'))
return response
with sync_playwright() as pw:
browser = pw.chromium.launch(headless=False)
context = browser.new_context(viewport={"width": 1920, "height": 1080})
page = context.new_page()
# enable intercepting for this page
page.on("request", intercept_request)
page.on("response", intercept_response)
page.goto("https://google.com/")
Often these background requests can contain important dynamic data. Blocking some requests can also reduce the bandwidth used by the scraper, for more on that see How to block resources in Playwright and Python?