How to retrieve HTML content using a headless browser in Python?

I’m developing an automation tool that conducts various searches and downloads results. Initially, I need to authenticate with a website, navigate to the search interface, configure search parameters, send a POST request for the HTML response, and then analyze the response for downloadable items. Could you provide guidance or examples demonstrating how to achieve this? What are the most effective libraries for this task?

Use selenium with a headless browser for this. Start with:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.options import Options

Enable headless mode:

options = Options()
options.headless = True

Initialize the driver:

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)

Login and navigate:

driver.get(‘your_login_url’)

Use driver methods to interact and submit the form. After login, navigate or post requests using

driver.execute_script

Retrieve HTML with:

html_content = driver.page_source

Remember to driver.quit() when done. Use BeautifulSoup for content analysis. This should set you on the right path!