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 Chrome web browser, Selenium requires the installation of Chromedriver. If it’s not installed, a generic exception will be triggered, complicating efforts to scrape web data efficiently. Addressing this, utilizing a reliable web scraping API can be a practical workaround. Such APIs bypass the need for direct browser manipulation, offering a seamless and efficient alternative for extracting web data without encountering the common pitfalls associated with browser driver dependencies and path errors.
selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'chromedriver' executable needs to be in PATH.
This could also indicate that while chromedriver is installed, Selenium is unable to locate it. To resolve this, the chromedriver location should be added to the PATH environment variable:
$ export PATH=$PATH:/location/where/chromedriver/is/
Alternatively, the driver can be specified directly in the Selenium initiation code:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=r'yourpathchromedriver.exe')
driver.get('https://bankstatementpdfconverter.com/')
Another option to avoid these complications is to use web scraping APIs, such as those provided by Scrape Network.