Chrome Web Scraper Pagination
Set up pagination with “Next” button using Element Click …
Description:
Make sure to set the delay and Click type to “Click more”.
{“_id”:”web-scraper-element-click-pagination-next”, “startUrl”:[“], “selectors”:[{“id”:”product-wrapper”, “type”:”SelectorElementClick”, “parentSelectors”:[“_root”], “selector”:”umbnail”, “multiple”:true, “delay”:”500″, “clickElementSelector”:””, “clickType”:”clickMore”, “discardInitialElements”:”do-not-discard”, “clickElementUniquenessType”:”uniqueCSSSelector”}, {“id”:”name”, “type”:”SelectorText”, “parentSelectors”:[“product-wrapper”], “selector”:”a”, “multiple”:false, “regex”:””, “delay”:0}, {“id”:”price”, “type”:”SelectorText”, “parentSelectors”:[“product-wrapper”], “selector”:””, “multiple”:false, “regex”:””, “delay”:0}, {“id”:”reviews”, “type”:”SelectorText”, “parentSelectors”:[“product-wrapper”], “selector”:””, “multiple”:false, “regex”:””, “delay”:0}]}
Scraping websites using the Scraper extension for Chrome – School of Data
If you are using Google Chrome there is a browser extension for scraping web pages. It’s called “Scraper” and it is easy to use. It will help you scrape a website’s content and upload the results to google docs.
Walkthrough: Scraping a website with the Scraper extension
Open Google Chrome and click on Chrome Web Store
Search for “Scraper” in extensions
The first search result is the “Scraper” extension
Click the add to chrome button.
Now let’s go back to the listing of UK MPs
Open
Now mark the entry for one MP
Right click and select “scrape similar…”
A new window will appear – the scraper console
In the scraper console you will see the scraped content
Click on “Save to Google Docs…” to save the scraped content as a Google Spreadsheet.
Walkthrough: extended scraping with the Scraper extension
Note: Before beginning this recipe – you may find it useful to understand a bit about HTML. Read our HTML primer.
Easy wasn’t it? Now let’s do something a little more complicated. Let’s say we’re interested in the roles a specific actress played. The source for all kinds of data on this is the IMDB (You can also search on sites like DBpedia or Freebase for this kinds of information; however, we’ll stick to IMDB to show the principle)
Let’s say we’re interested in creating a timeline with all the movies the Italian actress Asia Argento ever starred; where do we start?
The IMDB has a quite comprehensive archive of actors. Asia Argento’s site is:
If you open the page you’ll see all the roles she ever played, together with a title and the year – let’s scrape this information
Try to scrape it like we did above
You’ll see the list comes out garbled – this is because the list here is structured quite differently.
Go to the scraper console. Notice the small box on the upper left, saying XPath?
XPath is a query language for HTML and XML.
XPath can help you find the elements in the page you’re interested in – all you need to do is find the right element and then write the xpath for it.
Now let’s assemble our table.
You’ll see that our current Xpath – the one including the whole information is “//div[3]/div[3]/div[2]/div”
Xpath is very simple it tells the computer to look at the HTML document and select
However, we’d like to have the data separated out.
To do this use the columns part of the scraper console…
Let’s find our title first – look at the title using Inspect Element
See how the title is within a tag? Let’s add the tag to our xpath.
The expression seems to work well: let’s make this our first column
In the “Columns” section, change the name of the first column to “title”
Now let’s add the XPATH for the title to it
The xpaths in the columns section are relative, that means “. /b” will select the element
add “. /b” to the xpath for the title column and click “scrape”
See how you only get titles?
Now let’s continue for year? Years are within one
Create a new column by clicking on the small plus next to your “title” column
Now create the “year” column with xpath “. /span”
Click on scrape and see how the year is added
See how easily we got information out of a less structured webpage?
Last updated on Sep 02, 2013.
Chrome extension webscraper.io – how does pagination work …
I am trying to scrape tables of a website using the google chrome extension In the tutorial of the extension, it is documented how to scrape a website with different pages, say, “page 1”, “page 2” and “page 3” where each of the pages is directly linked on the main page.
In the example of the website I am trying to scrape, however, there is only a “next” button to access the next site. If I follow the steps in the tutorial and create a link for the “next” page, it will only consider page 1 and 2. Creating a “next” link for each page is not feasible because they are too many. How can I get the webscraper to include all pages? Is there a way to loop through pages using the webscraper extension?
I am aware of this possible duplicate: pagination Chrome web scraper. However, it was not well received and contains no useful answers.
asked Jan 12 ’17 at 10:41
Following the advanced documentation here, the problem is solved by making the “pagination” link a parent of its own. Then, the scraping software will recursively go through all pages and their “next” page. In their words,
To extract items from all of the pagination links including the ones that are not visible at the beginning you need to create another Link selector that selects the pagination links. Figure 2 shows how the link selector should be created in the sitemap. When the scraper opens a category link it will extract items that are available in the page. After that it will find the pagination links and also visit those. If the pagination link selector is made a child to itself it will recursively discover all pagination pages.
answered Jan 12 ’17 at 10:55
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Frequently Asked Questions about chrome web scraper pagination
How do you Paginate a web scraper?
Walkthrough: Scraping a website with the Scraper extensionOpen Google Chrome and click on Chrome Web Store.Search for “Scraper” in extensions.The first search result is the “Scraper” extension.Click the add to chrome button.Now let’s go back to the listing of UK MPs.More items…•Sep 2, 2013
How do I use Chrome data scraper?
Web Scraping SalaryAnnual SalaryMonthly PayTop Earners$131,500$10,95875th Percentile$104,000$8,666Average$79,018$6,58425th Percentile$60,000$5,000
