How to get website to consistently return content from a GET request when it's inconsistent? - beautifulsoup

Question

I posted a similar question earlier but I think this is a more refined question.
I'm trying to scrape: https://www.prosportstransactions.com/football/Search/SearchResults.php?Player=&Team=&BeginDate=&EndDate=&PlayerMovementChkBx=yes&submit=Search&start=0
My code randomly throws errors when I send a GET request to the URL. After debugging, I saw the following happen. A GET request for the following url will be sent(Example URL, could happen on any page): https://www.prosportstransactions.com/football/Search/SearchResults.php?Player=&Team=&BeginDate=&EndDate=&PlayerMovementChkBx=yes&submit=Search&start=2400
The webpage will then say "There were no matching transactions found.". However, if I refresh the page, the content will then be loaded. I'm using BeautifulSoup and Selenium and have put sleep statements in my code in hopes that it'll work but to no avail. Is this a problem on the website's end? It doesn't make sense to me how one GET request will return nothing but the exact same request will return something. Also, is there anything I could to fix it or is it out of control?
Here is a sample of my code:
t
def scrapeWebsite(url, start, stop):
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='/Users/Downloads/chromedriver')
print(start, stop)
madeDict = {"Date": [], "Team": [], "Name": [], "Relinquished": [], "Notes": []}
#for i in range(0, 214025, 25):
for i in range(start, stop, 25):
print("Current Page: " + str(i))
currUrl = url + str(i)
#print(currUrl)
#r = requests.get(currUrl)
#soupPage = BeautifulSoup(r.content)
driver.get(currUrl)
#Sleep program for dynamic refreshing
time.sleep(1)
soupPage = BeautifulSoup(driver.page_source, 'html.parser')
#page = urllib2.urlopen(currUrl)
#time.sleep(2)
#soupPage = BeautifulSoup(page, 'html.parser')
info = soupPage.find("table", attrs={'class': 'datatable center'})
time.sleep(1)
extractedInfo = info.findAll("td")
The error occurs at the last line. "findAll" complains because it can't find findAll when the content is null(meaning the GET request returned nothing)

Answer 1

I did some workaround to scrape all the page using try except.
Probably the requests loop it is so fast and the page can't support it.
See the example below, worked like a charm:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
URL = 'https://www.prosportstransactions.com/football/Search/SearchResults.php?Player=&Team=&BeginDate=&EndDate=' \
'&PlayerMovementChkBx=yes&submit=Search&start=%s'
def scrape(start=0, stop=214525):
for page in range(start, stop, 25):
current_url = URL % page
print('scrape: current %s' % page)
while True:
try:
response = requests.request('GET', current_url)
if response.ok:
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content.decode('utf-8'), features='html.parser')
table = soup.find("table", attrs={'class': 'datatable center'})
trs = table.find_all('tr')
slice_pos = 1 if page > 0 else 0
for tr in trs[slice_pos:]:
yield tr.find_all('td')
break
except Exception as exception:
print(exception)
for columns in scrape():
values = [column.text.strip() for column in columns]
# Continuous your code ...