Scraping a dynamic ecommerce page with infinite scroll

Question

I'm using rvest in R to do some scraping. I know some HTML and CSS.

I want to get the prices of every product of a URI:

http://www.linio.com.co/tecnologia/celulares-telefonia-gps/

The new items load as you go down on the page (as you do some scrolling).

What I've done so far:

Linio_Celulares <- html("http://www.linio.com.co/celulares-telefonia-gps/")

Linio_Celulares %>%
  html_nodes(".product-itm-price-new") %>%
  html_text()

And i get what i need, but just for the 25 first elements (those load for default).

 [1] "$ 1.999.900" "$ 1.999.900" "$ 1.999.900" "$ 2.299.900" "$ 2.279.900"
 [6] "$ 2.279.900" "$ 1.159.900" "$ 1.749.900" "$ 1.879.900" "$ 189.900"  
[11] "$ 2.299.900" "$ 2.499.900" "$ 2.499.900" "$ 2.799.000" "$ 529.900"  
[16] "$ 2.699.900" "$ 2.149.900" "$ 189.900"   "$ 2.549.900" "$ 1.395.900"
[21] "$ 249.900"   "$ 41.900"    "$ 319.900"   "$ 149.900" 

Question: How to get all the elements of this dynamic section?

I guess, I could scroll the page until all elements are loaded and then use html(URL). But this seems like a lot of work (i'm planning of doing this on different sections). There should be a programmatic work around.

Answer 1

As @nrussell suggested, you can use RSelenium to programatically scroll down the page before getting the source code.

You could for example do:

library(RSelenium)
library(rvest)
#start RSelenium
checkForServer()
startServer()
remDr <- remoteDriver()
remDr$open()

#navigate to your page
remDr$navigate("http://www.linio.com.co/tecnologia/celulares-telefonia-gps/")

#scroll down 5 times, waiting for the page to load at each time
for(i in 1:5){      
remDr$executeScript(paste("scroll(0,",i*10000,");"))
Sys.sleep(3)    
}

#get the page html
page_source<-remDr$getPageSource()

#parse it
html(page_source[[1]]) %>% html_nodes(".product-itm-price-new") %>%
  html_text()