Background story: I need to obtain the handles of the tagged Twitter users from an attached Twitter media. There's no current API method to do that unfortunately (see https://twittercommunity.com/t/how-to-get-tags-of-a-media-in-a-tweet/185614 and https://github.com/twitterdev/open-evolution/issues/34). I have no other choice but to scrape, this is an example URL: https://twitter.com/justinwood_/status/1626275168157851650/media_tags. This is the page which pops up when you click on the tags link under the media of the parent Tweet: https://twitter.com/justinwood_/status/1626275168157851650/
The React generated DOM is deep and ugly, but would be scrapeable, however I do not want to log in with any account to get banned. Unfortunately when you visit https://twitter.com/justinwood_/status/1626275168157851650/media_tags in an Incognito window the popup shows up dead empty. However when I dig into the network requests the /TweetDetail GraphQL endpoint is full of messages about the anonymous page visit, fortunately it still contains the list of handles I need despite of all of this.
So what I need to have is a scraper which is able to process JavaScript, and capture the response for that specific GraphQL call. Selenium uses a headless Chrome under the hood, so it is able to process JavaScript, and Selenium-Wire offers the ability to capture the response.
Unfortunately my crafted Selenium-Wire script only has the TweetResultByRestId and UsersByRestId GraphQL requests but is missing the TweetDetail. I don't know what to tweak to make all the requests to happen. I iterated over a ton of Chrome options. Here is a variation of my script:
from seleniumwire import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")
chrome_options.add_argument("--no-sandbox")
chrome_options.add_argument("--headless") # for Jenkins
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-dev-shm-usage") # Jenkins
chrome_options.add_argument('--start-maximized')
chrome_options.add_argument('--window-size=1900,1080')
chrome_options.add_argument('--ignore-certificate-errors-spki-list')
chrome_options.add_argument('--ignore-ssl-errors')
selenium_options = {
'request_storage_base_dir': '/tmp', # Use /tmp to store captured data
'exclude_hosts': ''
}
ser = Service('/usr/bin/chromedriver')
ser.service_args=["--verbose", "--log-path=test.log"]
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=ser, options=chrome_options, seleniumwire_options=selenium_options)
tweet_id = "1626275168157851650"
twitter_media_url = f"https://twitter.com/justinwood_/status/{tweet_id}/media_tags"
driver.get(twitter_media_url)
driver.wait_for_request("/TweetDetail", timeout=10)
Any ideas?
