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, we might want to pause our scraping session by saving cookies and resume it later. Using Playwright, to save and load cookies we need to refer to the context
object which has methods cookies()
and add_cookies()
:
import json
from pathlib import Path
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
with sync_playwright() as pw:
browser = pw.chromium.launch(headless=False)
# To save cookies to a file first extract them from the browser context:
context = browser.new_context(viewport={"width": 1920, "height": 1080})
page = context.new_page()
page.goto("http://httpbin.dev/cookies/set/mycookie/myvalue")
cookies = context.cookies()
Path("cookies.json").write_text(json.dumps(cookies))
# Then, we can restore cookies from file:
context = browser.new_context(viewport={"width": 1920, "height": 1080})
context.add_cookies(json.loads(Path("cookies.json").read_text()))
page = context.new_page()
page.goto("http://httpbin.dev/cookies")
print(context.cookies()) # we can test whether they were set correctly
# will print:
[
{
"sameSite": "Lax",
"name": "mycookie",
"value": "myvalue",
"domain": "httpbin.dev",
"path": "/",
"expires": -1,
"httpOnly": False,
"secure": False,
}
]