So I'm trying to login to Quora using Python and then scrape some stuff.
I'm using Selenium to login to the site. Here's my code:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get('http://www.quora.com/')
username = driver.find_element_by_name('email')
password = driver.find_element_by_name('password')
username.send_keys('email')
password.send_keys('password')
password.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
driver.close()
Now the questions:
It took ~4 minutes to find and fill the login form, which painfully slow. Is there something I can do to speed up the process?
When it did login, how do I make sure there were no errors? In other words, how do I check the response code?
How do I save cookies with selenium so I can continue scraping once I login?
If there is no way to make selenium faster, is there any other alternative for logging in? (Quora doesn't have an API)
I had a similar problem with very slow find_elements_xxx calls in Python selenium using the ChromeDriver. I eventually tracked down the trouble to a driver.implicitly_wait() call I made prior to my find_element_xxx() calls; when I took it out, my find_element_xxx() calls ran quickly.
Now, I know those elements were there when I did the find_elements_xxx() calls. So I cannot imagine why the implicit_wait should have affected the speed of those operations, but it did.