Sending the Initial Request Using the Start_Requests() Methodįor the initial request we’ll create a Spider class and give it the name of Pagi :įor hats in response.css('div.as-t-product-grid_item'): Now that we know the initial URL for the request we can create a custom spider. Note: not all pages follow this same structure so make sure to always check which parameters change and how. Understanding this structure will help us build a function to change the page parameter in the URL and increase it by 1, allowing us to go to the next page without a next button. Although we’re going to use the next button to navigate this website’s pagination, it is not as simple in every case. Notice that the page one URL changes when you go back to the page using the navigation, changing to page=0. Still, let’s see how the URL changes when clicking on the second page. This is great news, as selecting the next button on every page will be easier than cycling through each page number. So if we go to and scroll to the last product listed, we can see that it uses a numbered pagination plus a next button. To scrape paginated content, we need to understand how it works and plan accordingly, and there’s no better way to do it than inspecting the pages and seeing how the URL itself changes from one page to the next. Developers tend to use different structures to make it easier to navigate for them and, in some cases, optimize the navigation experience for search engine crawlers like Google and real users. URL structure is pretty much unique to each website. Understanding the URL Structure of the Website To save us time and headaches, we’ll use ScraperAPI, an API that uses machine learning, huge browser farms, 3rd party proxies, and years of statistical analysis to handle every anti-bot mechanism our script could encounter automatically.īest of all, setting up ScraperAPI into our project is super easy with Scrapy: Also, some websites use advanced techniques like CAPTCHAs and browser behavior profiling. The hardest part of handling paginated pages is not writing the script itself, it’s how to not get our bot blocked by the server.įor that, we’ll need to create a function (or set of functions) that rotates our IP address after several attempts (meaning we also need access to a pool of IP addresses). Now you can see that Scrapy kick-started our project for us by installing all the necessary files. Once that’s ready, we’ll input cd venv and create a new Scrapy project: scrapy startproject scrapypagination. Now, installing Scrapy is as simple as typing pip3 install scrapy – it might take a few seconds for it to download and install it. Your command prompt should look like this: To activate it, just type source venv/bin/activate. Where the second venv is the name of your environment – but you can call it whatever you want. It allows us to crawl and extract data from websites, parse the raw data into a structured format, and select elements using CSS and/or XPath selectors.įirst, let’s create a new directory (we’ll call it pagination-scraper) and create a python virtual environment inside using the command python -m venv venv. Set Up Your Development Environmentīefore we start writing any code, we need to set up our environment to work with Scrapy, a Python library designed for web scraping. Keep reading for an in-depth explanation on how to implement this code into your script, along with how to deal with pages without a next button. Yield response.follow(next_page, callback=self.parse) TLDR: here’s a quick snippet to deal with pagination in Scrapy using the “next” button : Other than that, everything should be the same. Without further ado, let’s jump right into it! Scraping a Website with Pagination Using Python Scrapyįor this tutorial, we’ll be scraping the SnowAndRock men’s hats category to extract all product names, prices, and links.Ī little disclaimer- we’re writing this article using a Mac, so you’ll have to adapt things a little bit to work on PC. In this article, you’ll learn how to build a pagination web scraper in just a few minutes and without getting blocked by any anti-scraping techniques.Īlthough you can follow this tutorial with no prior knowledge, it might be a good idea to check out our Scrapy for beginners guide first for a more in-depth explanation of the framework before you get started. However, web scraping pagination adds some complexity to our work. It’s standard practice for eCommerce and content sites to break down content into multiple pages to improve user experience. If you’re working on a large web scraping project (like scraping product information) you have probably stumbled upon paginated pages.
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