Reading Real Time Table - Selenium - python-3.x

Question

I'm trying to read a dynamic table, which is updated 1-3 times per second. I'm using Selenium, in Python 3.x, but if you have a solution for other languages I can work it out as well.
My question is: what is the best practice for reading frequently updated tables?
What I've tried:
driver.wait.until along with expected_conditions
re-read the table with a call to find_elements if a stale exception is thrown
Neither of them is working, due to the high refreshing rate. I can successfully retrieve the table for a moment, but when I try to access its rows the moment after, I get a stale exception. It's worth to say that when I try the same code in the same table when there are less frequent updates everything works fine.
I'm not posting any code for the moment, as I'd be interested in knowing what more experienced people do in this case.
My naive thinking: Being non-expert (but keen to learn) in web scraping nor in any web-related languages, I'd say that if this was a problem with dynamic data, I'd take a pointer or a reference to the actual table (and then looping dynamically on the rows). Is that possible in this framework?

Answer 1

We usually get stale element exception when the Webelement has been changed at present when compared to its attributes at the time of webelement's creation.
Let's say the intent is to print second data element in a table every seconds, our code looks like this, (Sorry for giving the code in Java)
//This will work if the page is static
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//td[2]"));
for(int i = 0; i< 10;i++)
{
System.out.println(element.getText());
Thread.sleep(1000);
}
To make this work for dynamic loading tables / refreshing tables we need to initiate the webelement before the each iteration something like this,
//This will work for dynamic content
WebElement element = null;
for(int i = 0; i< 10;i++)
{
element = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//td[2]"));
System.out.println(element.getText());
Thread.sleep(1000);
}
In the case, if you need to get the i'th cell value in a table, we can parameter the value inside the xpath such as,
//In this case we need the fifth cell value
int j = 5;
WebElement element = null;
for(int i = 0; i< 10;i++)
{
element = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//td["+j+"]"));
System.out.println(element.getText());
Thread.sleep(1000);
}
In the case if you need to have all five cell values,
WebElement element = null;
for(int i = 1; i<=5;i++)
{
element = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//td["+i+]"));
System.out.println(element.getText());
Thread.sleep(1000);
}
Just construct a loop accordingly.
Hope this helps you. Thanks.