In web development, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) allows web pages to make asynchronous requests to the server, enabling the dynamic loading and updating of content without page reloading. When it comes to handling AJAX requests in Python, there are various libraries available. One such library is requests-html, a powerful library that utilizes the requests library to make HTTP requests and parse HTML content.

In this blog post, we will explore how to use requests-html to handle AJAX requests in Python, allowing you to easily retrieve dynamic data from web pages.

Installation

First, let’s install the requests-html library using pip:

pip install requests-html

Making AJAX Requests

To make AJAX requests using requests-html, you will need to create an instance of the HTMLSession class. This class provides methods for making HTTP requests and parsing the returned HTML content.

Here’s an example of how to create an HTMLSession object and make a GET request to a website:

from requests_html import HTMLSession

session = HTMLSession()
response = session.get('https://example.com')

Handling Dynamic Content

When dealing with AJAX-based web applications, a significant portion of the web page’s content is dynamically loaded after the initial page load. It means that the content is not present in the initial HTML response but loaded dynamically using JavaScript.

To handle such scenarios, requests-html provides a method called render() that will execute JavaScript on the page and retrieve the complete rendered content.

Here’s an example of how to use the render() method to handle dynamic content:

from requests_html import HTMLSession

session = HTMLSession()
response = session.get('https://example.com')
response.html.render()

Extracting Data

Once the dynamic content is rendered, you can use requests-html’s built-in methods to extract data from the rendered HTML. For example, you can use CSS selectors or XPath expressions to locate and extract specific elements.

Here’s an example of how to extract data using CSS selectors:

from requests_html import HTMLSession

session = HTMLSession()
response = session.get('https://example.com')
response.html.render()

# Extract all text from <h1> tags using CSS selector
titles = response.html.find('h1')
for title in titles:
    print(title.text)

Conclusion

Using the requests-html library, you can handle AJAX requests and retrieve dynamic content from web pages in Python effortlessly. It allows you to scrape data from websites that heavily rely on AJAX for content rendering. With the ability to execute JavaScript and utilize CSS selectors or XPath expressions, requests-html provides a convenient way to interact with AJAX-based web applications programmatically.

Give it a try and explore the numerous possibilities that requests-html offers!