How to scrape images from DuckDuckGo's image search results in Python
I'm creating an application with python that's going to show images scraped from DuckDuckGo's image search results. So I need to get a list of links to the images based on the search. The problem is that the HTML that constitutes DuckDuckGo's image search results does not contain any image tags but instead, the images seem to be stored in division tags. How can I with the help of python scrape those damn links to the images and store them in a variable on my program?
What I want my variable to look like:
image_links = ["https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo&atb=v166-4_p&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fen%2Fthumb%2F8%2F88%2FDuckDuckGo_logo.svg%2F1200px-DuckDuckGo_logo.svg.png","https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo&atb=v166-4_p&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fen%2Fthumb%2F8%2F88%2FDuckDuckGo_logo.svg%2F1200px-DuckDuckGo_logo.svg.png"]
A visualization of DuckDuckGo's HTML structure in its image search results
Edit:
When I scrape the HTML from the URL by doing this:
source = urllib.request.urlopen("https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo&atb=v166-4_p&iax=images&ia=images").read()
it doesn't return any image tags at all.
I am checking that by doing this:
source_tree = BeautifulSoup(source, 'html.parser')
links = [img.get('src') for img in source_tree.find_all('img', _class='tile--img__img')]
print(f"links: {links}")
print(f"img in source_tree: {'img' in str(source_tree)}")
print(f"source_tree: {source_tree}")
Output:
links: []
img in source_tree: False
source_tree: <!DOCTYPE html>
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What's the reason for this and how can I fix it?
Answer
The images are actually stored in img tags, they are just nested inside of some div elements.
You should be able to find all of the images on the page with the CSS selector img.tile--img__img.
You could use a library like Beautiful Soup to query for all of those links, like so:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
# Considering your HTML is in the variable `source`
source_tree = BeautifulSoup(source, 'html.parser')
links = [img.get('src') for img in source_tree.find_all('img', class_='tile--img__img')]
Edit
Seems like the issue here is that duckduckgo serves the images page with the use of some JavaScript to display all of the img tiles. Since the Python request can only fetch the resources and not execute any JavaScript, then you may need to implement a different solution. See this other SO answer for some options.