How to Scrape and Handle Pagination (Multiple Pages)
How to Scrape and Handle Pagination (Multiple Pages)
Title: Mastering Web Scraping and Pagination Handling: A Comprehensive Guide
Introduction:
Web scraping automation has revolutionized the way we gather data from the vast expanse of the internet. In this blog post, we delve into the intricacies of scraping and handling pagination, focusing on a real-world example of scraping housing data from a website.
Understanding the Automation Process:
As described in the script, the automation process involves navigating to specific web pages, adjusting parameters for efficient scraping, and extracting valuable information for analysis.
Scraping Process:
The automation first accesses the target page and modifies the display settings to streamline the scraping process. A brief delay ensures smooth loading before extracting essential data points such as links to different listings.
Handling Pagination:
An essential aspect of web scraping, pagination handling allows the automation to seamlessly traverse multiple pages of data. By intelligently monitoring the presence of a "Next Page" button, the script efficiently determines when to move to the next set of results.
Automation Logic:
The script employs a smart filtering mechanism to decide whether to continue scraping or halt the process. By checking for specific text indicators like "Siguiente," the automation dynamically adjusts its course of action, ensuring a robust and efficient scraping operation.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, mastering the art of web scraping and pagination handling opens up a world of possibilities for extracting valuable insights from online sources. By following a systematic approach like the one outlined in this blog post, you can enhance your data gathering capabilities and automate repetitive tasks with ease.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Okay. So what this automation does specifically is it goes to the Encuentra page, um, specifically the ones where it's houses for sale. And then it changes this to be 50 from 15, just so we can have less pages. Then we give it a little bit of a delay so that this can load itself. And then we are going to scrape all of the, um, we're going to scrape all of the links, which is just scraping this right here.
That way we can loop over all of this to get the, is it for sale by owner for sale by broker and things like that. We scroll down a little bit further and this is how we handle pagination. So at the very bottom here, under all 50 records, There is this type of, uh, next page set up. So what we do is, is we scrape this element right here.
I'll play this so that you can see where that goes. Um, we scrape this and then we have a filter saying if this includes the text Siguiente, then we want to, um, continue, which continues to a click. If it does not, then we want to end the automation immediately because we already scraped all the data. So what happens is, is we scrape this text and we see if it exists or not.
Cause eventually this next page button goes away when there's no more pages left. When that happens, the automation is going to see right here that the value does not include Siguiente and it'll, um, exit. Now, every time this automation does include it, it resets to step three because of this filter, which makes it wait a second.
And then it scrapes a list again, um, appending it to what was there previously so that we can build a really massive list from this.