Web scraping can be a powerful tool for extracting valuable data from websites, and the list trigger feature in automation tools like TaskMagic offers a seamless way to handle pagination. In this blog post, we'll walk through a practical example of using the list trigger to scrape data from Yellow Pages, demonstrating how easy and efficient it can be to automate the pagination process.

Let's imagine we want to scrape business listings for dentists from Yellow Pages. With the help of automation, we can quickly set up a workflow to navigate the site, extract the desired information, and handle pagination effortlessly.

By leveraging the list trigger for pagination, we streamline the web scraping process and ensure that the automation repeats the necessary steps efficiently. This method not only saves time but also reduces the chances of errors that can occur when manually handling pagination.

Mastering web scraping with the list trigger for pagination opens up a world of possibilities for automating data extraction tasks. Whether you are scraping business listings, product information, or any other data that requires pagination, utilizing the list trigger feature can significantly enhance the efficiency and accuracy of your web scraping workflows.

Step 1- Click on New automation

Step 2-Click on Web

Step 3-Write Yellowpages in URL box and save go to URL to open it in Browser

Step 4- Click on Type to record a type step

Step 5- Click on Scrape a List

Step 6- Select Headlines and Click on Confirm

Step 7- Click on Trigger to record setup

Step 8- Click on List

Step 9- Add number to specify Loop — Click on Continue

Step 10- Drag the loop from left to right to skip the steps

The list trigger is also a really easy way to handle pagination. An example of that is if we wanted to scrape, um, yellow pages, for example, right here, I'll build this automation quickly with us so we can see what this looks like. I can click new automation web, not on this one, because in this example, I'm not using cookies.

And then we're going to use the list trigger to handle pagination.

So first URL is going to be going straight to yellow pages. So I'll paste that there. And then I'm going to record a type step dentist, and then I'm not going to change the city right now for this example, I'll just record a click step of clicking the find button. Next. I'm going to scrape a list and I'm going to go down to where all of the businesses started.

So right here, and I'll scrape all of these, and I'm not going to go through a ton of this, just basic example of scraping. Then what we want to do is we want to record a click step of the next page button at the bottom here, and this bar is kind of in the way. This will probably give us a suggested step actually when we click this.

So we can deny that. And now let's record a click step of that next page button. Since that was very annoying, blocking our bar, we could move the bar to the top, but since it was completely covering it, I couldn't do that. And now this is a very simple way for us to scrape all of these pages using the list trigger.

The way that this automation works obviously is go to yellow pages. com type dentist. Click the find button. And then we're scraping the list of results from this page. Then after scraping, we click the next button. So what we need to do is we need to repeat this scrape every time we click next. So to do that, we can set up a list trigger by clicking here and then select list.

And then we're going to specify the amount of times we want to loop. Since there's five pages, I'm going to enter five and then I'll click continue. And now we need to adjust our slider so that it only loops the steps I want it to. Let me dismiss these really quick. So we do not want to go to yellow pages every single time.

We do not want to retype dentist every single time. And we do not want to reclick find every time. We're scraping inside of yellow pages. So let me pull this and we do just to show you. We want to scrape after we get to this page. If we were looping over a Google sheet or something, and we had a different category, we were searching our loop might start from the yellow pages, search that way it goes, dentists, electricians, et cetera, but not in this use case.

So What we want to do is we want to make sure that after we click find, we repeat these two steps a bunch of times. We scrape a list, we click next, we scrape a list, we click next. So that's all we need to drag our list to be. I'm going to drag this all the way to the right and this all the way to step four.

Now what this automation will do is go to yellow pages, and Type dentist, click, find, scrape a list, click next. Then it's going to go back to step four, scrape a list, click next back to step four, five times, because we specified five in that example there.