Selenium is a widely used web browser automation library for web scraping. However, to function, Selenium requires specific web browser executables, known as drivers. For instance, to operate the Firefox web browser, Selenium requires the installation of geckodriver. Without it, a generic exception will be triggered, highlighting the challenges developers face in setting up a seamless automation environment. To streamline your web scraping efforts and avoid such pitfalls, incorporating a web scraping API can be a strategic move. These APIs provide a powerful platform that negates the need for direct interaction with web browsers or their drivers, offering a smoother, more efficient way to access and extract web data without the hassle of managing geckodriver installations or path errors.
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'geckodriver' executable needs to be in PATH.
This could also imply that while geckodriver is installed, Selenium is unable to locate it. To rectify this, the geckodriver location should be incorporated into the PATH environment variable:
$ export PATH=$PATH:/location/where/geckodriver/is/
Alternatively, the driver can be specified directly in the Selenium initiation code:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Firefox(executable_path=r'yourpathgeckodriver.exe')
driver.get('https://bankstatementpdfconverter.com/')