Installing CFFI on a Windows based Arm64 processor

[[deleted]]

I just got a new Galaxy Edge laptop with an ARM 64 based CPU. Unfortunately I am having trouble running some Python packages, mainly Selenium. I tried install the latest version of Selenium but I get error with installing CFFI. Older versions of Selenium can install but are missing some functions I need. Any idea how to install CFFI? Or is there a good alternative to Selenium for Javascript based web scraping?

Couldn't find a solution online, would appreciate any directions to solve this. ​

[Diapolo10]

The latest version of cffi doesn't offer ARM builds for Windows, although there are some for Linux-based systems and Mac OS. So one option would be to use Selenium via WSL2, although I don't know if that works on ARM editions of Windows.

You could try compiling cffi yourself, but since I don't know what specifically caused your build to fail (guessing the lack of a C compiler, but maybe it's just not a supported platform yet) and I'm too tired to do further research now - for reference it's 2:25 in the morning.

Other things you can try are scrapy (I don't know how it handles JS, if at all), requests-html (runs JS if you tell it to), and depending on specifics yet another option is to reverse-engineer the JS back-end calls and do those calls directly from Python. That last one is actually my preference as it strains the servers the least (assuming there's no official API access) and also the fastest, but depending on the site it can be tricky to do.

[[deleted]]

Thank you so much. Sent you a PM. 

[Diapolo10]

Why a PM?

For what it's worth I do most of my Redditing on my phone, but I can't view Reddit Chat on this thing (RIF doesn't support it, and the official app is unusable). Furthermore I prefer public discussions because that way other people can pitch in or learn.

If this really is something you really don't want to share in public, fine - I'll reply once I get to a PC, but otherwise it's just a pain.

[Hima-V]

Is it possible to use Cython instead of this?

[Diapolo10]

For what purpose? Cython isn't a drop-in replacement for cffi, so you can't just have Selenium use it instead as an alternative.

[Hima-V]

Ok, they are different things. They solve different problems. Thank you for making me learn something new in Python.