Python (+Selenium) Chrome script for IMDb People script

[afrocuban]

This is Selenium script specific for the People script here:


Script Description: This script automates the download of various IMDb pages using Selenium and ChromeDriver, including handling cookies and popups, and saving the resulting HTML to local files.
It automatically finds your localization by using service, the http://ipinfo.io API to get the country code and the dictionary to map to language acording to obtaining country code. If you don't want this, comment out first part of the script and uncomment the one at the end of this script. Open the script in text editor and read about this.
For this to work ensure that:

A. You installed python
B. You installed selenium and requests by

pip install selenium requests

C. You have your Chrome bin on a PATH
D. You have Python folder on your PATH
E. pythonw.exe is not missing, or it's containing folder is on the PATH

This script:

1. Uses Chrome browser instead Firefox
2. Uses chromedriver.exe instead geckodriver
3. Starts chromedriver.exe silently
4. Silently invokes browser in a headless mode (no pop-up windows of browser)
5. Scrapes .htm page of a given url
6. No path is needed to set manually inside the script - it is set to be relative to the path of selenium script!

For using relative path, ensure:

6A. You put this script into "Scripts" folder of your PVD instance.
6B. You put appropirate chromedriver.exe to the "Script" folder, too.

To silently invoke selenium script itself by PVD's .psf script (no pop-up windows of selenium script's cmd window), be sure to use pythonw.exe instead of python.exe, like this for example:

FileExecute('pythonw.exe', '"' + ScriptPath + 'selenium_script-Chrome_People.py" "' + URL + '" "' + ScriptPath + BASE_DOWNLOAD_FILE_NO_BOM + '"');

Now, the last one will probably be ensured by those who maintain corresponding scripts if interested in, and for now, those are Ivek and me, but be sure to check if it's there anyway.

You may want first to test the script manually, from cmd, for example like this:

C:\Users\user\selenium_script-Chrome_People.py "https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000017"

From this point on, everything is automated and headless.

[afrocuban]

Here's optimized selenium script, that should reduce time wait significantly.