Scrolling a Webpage of Infinite Length

Irfan Ahmad
2 min readJan 29, 2021

Since I started automating browsers for web scraping, scrolling the page was a challenge for me. I searched over the internet and found many solutions. One such solution was

browser.execute_script("window.scrollTo(x, y)")

where ‘x’ is the position over the x-axis and ‘y’ is the position over the y-axis.

But, how would I know these coordinates?

1st Approach

To solve the problem I found another answer

browser.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight)")

where ‘x’ = 0, and ‘y’= full height of the document.

2nd Approach

I decided to put some range for page size and run the scrolling code inside a loop i.e.

for i in range(0, 7000, 200):
browser.execute_script(f"window.scrollTo(x, {i})")

Here, I had defined a range for the page size i.e. 0 to 7000 px. When I ran the code, it iterated by a length of 200 to reach 7000–1px length.

Problem: I manually defined the page size. How would I know the exact page size?

3rd Approach

browser.execute_script(f"window.scrollTo(x, document.body.offsetHeight)")

4th Approach

while True:
browser.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight)")

Final Approach (The Success)

The solution I found was:

time.sleep(5)
while True:
height1 = driver.execute_script('return window.pageYOffset')
time.sleep(2)
scroll = driver.execute_script('window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight)')
height2 = driver.execute_script('return window.pageYOffset')
if height1 == height2:
break
else:
continue

Let me explain each line.

1- rest for a while

2- start an infinite while loop

3- find the current height of the scrollbar (not scroll to bottom)

4- rest for 2 seconds

5/6- scroll to the bottom

7- find this new height of the scrollbar

8- check if the new height of the scrollbar is equal to the old height.

(it would be different if the page loads again)

9- if heights are equal, break the loop.

10- else

11- continue the loop

Happy Automation

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Irfan Ahmad

A freelance python programmer, web developer and web scraper, data science and Bioinformatics student.