Can I use Playwright to scrape dynamic websites?

Yes, you can definitely use Playwright to scrape dynamic websites. Playwright is a Node.js library that provides a high-level API to control Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API, which makes it suitable for web scraping. It has various features including generating screenshots, creating PDFs, and automating form submissions, UI testing, keyboard inputs, etc.

Though Playwright is mainly used for end-to-end testing of web apps, it can also be used as a robust solution for web scraping of dynamic websites. Dynamic websites are those that generate content on the fly, often using JavaScript. Traditional scraping tools may struggle with such pages as they only grab the HTML content and often fail to interact with the JavaScript. Playwright, however, waits for all the JavaScript to load before scraping the data, thus it is ideal for dynamic sites.

Here is a simple example of how to use Playwright to scrape a dynamic website:

const playwright = require('playwright');

(async () => {
  const browser = await playwright.chromium.launch();
  const context = await browser.newContext();
  const page = await context.newPage();

  await page.goto('http://dynamicwebsite.com');

  // Wait for the selector to be loaded
  await page.waitForSelector('#content');

  const data = await page.evaluate(() => {
    const element = document.querySelector('#content');
    return element.innerText;
  });

  console.log(data);

  await browser.close();
})();

In this code:

• We first import the playwright module.
• Then we launch a new browser context.
• We navigate to the dynamic website with page.goto().
• We wait for the specific element we want to scrape to load on the page with page.waitForSelector().
• We evaluate a JavaScript expression in the page context to scrape our data.
• Finally, we log our scraped data and close the browser.

Remember that to use Playwright, you need to install it first. You can do it with the following npm command:

npm i playwright

Remember also that web scraping should be done responsibly and legally. Always respect the website's robots.txt file and terms of service.