How to Scrape Craigslist Data with Attributes in Every Listing?

This blog tells you how to scrape Craigslist data with attributes in every listing and how 3i Data Scraping can help you in doing that.

November 10, 2021

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Web scraping could be very useful when analyzing data. The key problem that is frequently encountered is while you require data from an item-specific site. With that, you require to get every items’ distinctive link to scrape craigslist data for the item. In this blog, we will explain to you how to scrape craigslist data for every unique item.

Initially, let’s import a few standard libraries:

Then, let’s get a link to the initial page of what we want to search. For our objectives, let’s utilize the keyword ‘motorcycles in New York City’.

Let’s print the HTML content from this page using the given link.

After that, print that out. This is a vast amount of code, which is not very useful; however, we would utilize BeautifulSoup, as given above, to assist us in parsing the HTML.

Scrape Craigslist Data with Attributes

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We can observe here that using a class ‘row’ would be essential. Let’s extract all these rows.

Now, what we require is getting the motorcycle components. We can perform it using these codes:

It looks excellent. We would need many items, notably a title, pricing, and every exclusive item’s URL, so we could use that later to have any particular data.

To have the pricing data, we need to utilize the ‘span’ having a class name We as the result prices.

We would utilize the code for essential text as well as strip attributes.

This looks like we can do it very well. The next component we should have is a URL. This is a bit more complicated but shouldn’t be tough. Using the inspect element, we can observe that it has a ‘href’ tag.

We can utilize this to build our code and get every unique link.

We would do it the same way through inspecting to get the class and tags and use it to create the code. In the end, let’s find the title. Our code will appear like this:

To find data from different pages, you need to create the pagination; however, let’s find the attributes regarding every particular bike using the link. Therefore, let’s select a listing.

Here is the list of attributes:

Let’s use a lito to build our code and use that for the URL to extract Craigslist data from.

Now, we have inspected a page to get what interests us.

Here, we can observe that an ‘attrgroup’ is very interesting and perhaps helpful as well as all the ‘spans. Therefore, let’s find all ‘attrgroups.’

As every listing will have different attributes, we could utilize the loop to have all attributes. With attributes, you can have different “spans.” Therefore, we must get all “spans” and have text taken from them.

Also, we can find the description as well, as it looks easier as it’s just the ‘section id’ using ‘posting body’:

While looking for the class, you utilize a ‘class_=’ method; however, when searching for the section, you utilize the dictionary and pass the ‘id’ (or other parameters it could have instead).