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.
Playwright is a popular web browser automation library for Python which can be run in Jupyter notebooks for quick web scraping scripts. However, since Jupyter notebooks run its own asyncio loops we cannot start the synchronous playwright client:
# in Jupyter:
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
playwright = sync_playwright().start()
"""
Error: It looks like you are using Playwright Sync API inside the asyncio loop.
Please use the Async API instead.
"""
To use Playwright in Jupyter notebooks we should use the asynchronous client explicitly:
# in Jupyter
from playwright.async_api import async_playwright
pw = await async_playwright().start()
browser = await pw.chromium.launch(headless=False)
page = await browser.new_page()
# note all methods are async (use the "await" keyword)
await page.goto("http://scrapfly.io/")
# to stop browser on notebook close we can add a shutdown hook:
def shutdown_playwright():
await browser.close()
await pw.stop()
import atexit
atexit.register(shutdown_playwright())