Python script to monitor changes on a webpage

If you need to be the first one to know when any changes have been made on a website you can use this Python script. It compares the code of webpages every 5 minutes and tells you whether there are any differences have been made.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import difflib
import time
from datetime import datetime

# target URL
url = "https://excelfiles.space/en/python-en/python-script-to-monitor-changes-on-a-webpage"
# act like a browser
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36'}

PrevVersion = ""
FirstRun = True
while True:

    # download the page
    response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    # parse the downloaded homepage
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "lxml")
    
    # remove all scripts and styles
    for script in soup(["script", "style"]):
        script.extract() 
    soup = soup.get_text()
    # compare the page text to the previous version
    if PrevVersion != soup:
        # on the first run - just memorize the page
        if FirstRun == True:
            PrevVersion = soup
            FirstRun = False
            print ("Start Monitoring "+url+ ""+ str(datetime.now()))
        else:
            print ("Changes detected at: "+ str(datetime.now()))
            OldPage = PrevVersion.splitlines()
            NewPage = soup.splitlines()
            # compare versions and highlight changes using difflib
            d = difflib.Differ()
            diff = d.compare(OldPage, NewPage)
            out_text = "\n".join([ll.rstrip() for ll in '\n'.join(diff).splitlines() if ll.strip()])
            print (out_text)
            OldPage = NewPage
            #print ('\n'.join(diff))
            PrevVersion = soup
    else:
        print( "No Changes "+ str(datetime.now()))
    time.sleep(300)
    continue

Result:

If we modify the script a little bit it can also show us what changed.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import difflib
import time
from datetime import datetime

# target URL
url = "https://excelfiles.space/"
# act like a browser
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36'}

PrevVersion = ""
FirstRun = True
while True:

    # download the page
    response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    # parse the downloaded homepage
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "lxml")
    
    # remove all scripts and styles
    for script in soup(["script", "style"]):
        script.extract() 
    soup = soup.get_text()
    # compare the page text to the previous version
    if PrevVersion != soup:
        # on the first run - just memorize the page
        if FirstRun == True:
            PrevVersion = soup
            FirstRun = False
            print ("Start Monitoring "+url+ ""+ str(datetime.now()))
        else:
            print ("Changes detected at: "+ str(datetime.now()))
            OldPage = PrevVersion.splitlines()
            NewPage = soup.splitlines()
            # compare versions and highlight changes using difflib
            #d = difflib.Differ()
            #diff = d.compare(OldPage, NewPage)
            diff = difflib.context_diff(OldPage,NewPage,n=10)
            out_text = "\n".join([ll.rstrip() for ll in '\n'.join(diff).splitlines() if ll.strip()])
            print (out_text)
            OldPage = NewPage
            #print ('\n'.join(diff))
            PrevVersion = soup
    else:
        print( "No Changes "+ str(datetime.now()))
    time.sleep(10)
    continue

Output: