I’m using Puppeteer to crawl Twitter. While $x in the console returns tweet text, page.$$ gives no results. How can I extract tweet content?
const tweetNodes = await page.retrieveItems("//div[@data-testid='tweetBody']");
I experienced a similar issue when trying to extract tweet contents with Puppeteer. It turned out that the method I used was designed for selecting elements using CSS selectors rather than XPath expressions. In my case, switching from page.$$ to page.$x resolved the problem. Once I made this adjustment, I could correctly query the tweets using an XPath expression. It seems like using the appropriate selector method not only corrected the issue but also simplified my code logic. I hope this insight helps resolve the issue you’re encountering.
hey, i had this issue too, and sometimes make sure tweets are fully loaded before trying any xpath query. using page.$x works fine if you wait for the right element. good luck!
In addition to the suggestions already mentioned, another approach that ensured success was incorporating explicit waiting conditions for reusable elements. This involved utilizing waitForXPath to make sure that the tweet elements were indeed present in the DOM before making the query. In my experience, the DOM may update dynamically and waiting reduced errors related to timing. Using page.$x alongside proper wait methods provided a more dependable extraction method, allowing me to gather tweet content without premature queries.
I faced a similar issue while working on a Twitter crawler and found that sometimes the problem wasn’t just about the wrong selector function. In my case I discovered that even with the right page.$x device, timing issues could result in empty selections. To overcome this, I switched to using a combination of page.waitForNetworkIdle and page.$x which allowed enough time for the dynamic content to load completely. Ensuring the environment was stable before executing the XPath query really helped me extract the tweet content successfully.