Selenium: retrieves data that loads when scrolling down

Question

I am trying to retrieve elements on a page with the ajax-load alla twitter scroll function. For some reason this does not work properly. I added some print statements to debug it, and I always get the same number of elements, and then the function returns. What am I doing wrong here?

wd = webdriver.Firefox()
wd.implicitly_wait(3)

def get_items(items):
    print len(items)
    wd.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);")
    # len(items) and len(wd.find_elements-by...()) both always seem to return the same number
    # if I were to start the loop with while True: it would work, but of course... never end
    while len(wd.find_elements_by_class_name('stream-item')) > len(items):
        items = wd.find_elements_by_class_name('stream-item')
        print items
        wd.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);")
    return items

def test():
    get_page('http://twitter.com/')
    get_items(wd.find_elements_by_class_name('stream-item'))

Answer 1

Try to sleep between

wd = webdriver.Firefox()
wd.implicitly_wait(3)

def get_items(items):
    print len(items)
    wd.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);")
    # len(items) and len(wd.find_elements-by...()) both always seem to return the same number
    # if I were to start the loop with while True: it would work, but of course... never end

    sleep(5) #seconds
    while len(wd.find_elements_by_class_name('stream-item')) > len(items):
        items = wd.find_elements_by_class_name('stream-item')
        print items
        wd.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);")
    return items

def test():
    get_page('http://twitter.com/')
    get_items(wd.find_elements_by_class_name('stream-item'))

Note. A difficult dream is intended only to demonstrate that it works. Please use the wait package to wait for a smart state.

Answer 2

while . . , :

def get_items(items):

    item_nb = [0, 1] # initializing a counter of number of items found in page

    while(item_nb[-1] > item_nb[-2]):   # exiting the loop when no more new items can be found in the page

        items = wd.find_elements_by_class_name('stream-item')
        time.sleep(5)
        browser.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);")

        item_nb.append(len(items))

    return items

`` `