The Instagram web browser allows you to view the follower list for any given public user and then click on the followers URL to open a window that paginates through viewers, Since it appears on my browser window, I assume that I will be able to scrape.

I watched a bunch of videos on Youtube and they are able to scrape followers using selenium but now when tried to do the same it's not happening maybe something has changed in Instagram.

I note that the URL changes to "https://www.instagram.com/instagram/followers" when this window pops up, but I can't seem to view the underlying page source for this URL.

I would like to do scrape the list of followers, and access this data directly.

CodePudding user response：

Have you ever heard about instaloader? It easily scrapes the followers, name, image and so on

CodePudding user response：

Instagram is updating their HTML code,structure frequently for improvements and to deter people from scraping their data. One of the main things that any expert will tell you about selenium is that it should only be used on personal websites.

Any time there is a change the whole selenium project breaks down and depending on how big this change is needs you need to spend hours/days rebuilding the project/figuring out what went wrong.

Any youtube video available is from months ago probably and instagram has changed their code since then so it would need to be updated.

It is doable but it requires a huge amount of work when there are already alternatives built for tracking followers and whatnot that are being maintained by big groups of people, not a one person endeavor.