In this blog post, we will explore how to use the requests-html library in Python to capture and screenshot web pages. requests-html is a popular library that allows us to easily interact with websites by making HTTP requests and parsing the HTML response.

Installing requests-html

First, we need to install the requests-html library. Open your terminal and run the following command:

$ pip install requests-html

Basic Usage

To get started, we need to import the necessary modules and initialize an instance of the HTMLSession class from requests-html. Here’s an example:

from requests_html import HTMLSession

# Create an HTML session
session = HTMLSession()

Now, we can use the session object to send HTTP requests to a website and fetch its HTML content. For example, let’s fetch the HTML content of the Python website:

# Send a GET request to the Python website
r = session.get('https://www.python.org')

# Access the HTML content
html_content = r.text

# print the HTML content
print(html_content)

Capturing Screenshots

To capture a screenshot of a web page, the requests-html library provides an html.render() method. This inbuilt method allows us to render the HTML content of a web page using a headless browser. Here’s an example:

# Render the HTML content using a headless browser
r.html.render()

# Capture a screenshot of the rendered page
r.html.render(screenshot='screenshot.png')

In the example above, we first render the HTML content using the render() method and then capture a screenshot of the rendered page using the screenshot argument.

Improving Rendering Performance

By default, requests-html uses a headless browser called Pyppeteer to render the web page content. However, Pyppeteer can be slow and resource-intensive, especially when capturing multiple screenshots. To overcome this, we can use an alternative headless browser called Pyppeteer-puppeteer which is a lightweight version of Pyppeteer.

To use Pyppeteer-puppeteer, we need to install it first:

$ pip install pyppeteer-puppeteer

Then, we can pass the Pyppeteer-puppeteer browser to the HTMLSession object:

from requests_html import HTMLSession
from pyppeteer import launch

# Create an HTML session with Pyppeteer-puppeteer browser
session = HTMLSession(browser_args=['--no-sandbox'], browser=launch())

By using Pyppeteer-puppeteer, you should notice improved performance when capturing screenshots.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we have explored how to use the requests-html library in Python to capture and screenshot web pages. We learned how to install the library, make HTTP requests, fetch HTML contents, and capture screenshots using the render() method. Additionally, we discussed using the lightweight Pyppeteer-puppeteer browser for better rendering performance.

The requests-html library provides a powerful and convenient way to interact with web pages and automate tasks. It can be used for web scraping, screen scraping, and performing various web-related tasks with great ease. Try it out in your next Python project!

Remember to always respect the terms of service and usage policies of the websites you are accessing when using web scraping and automation techniques.