Learn how to extract pagination data using Beautiful Soup, and set the stage for powerful web scraping. This guide demonstrates parsing HTML elements step-by-step to identify and handle pagination effectively.
Key Insights
- Inspect the HTML to identify the target element, specifically the
LItag with classcurrent, to extract the pagination text "page 1 of 50." - Apply Python's Beautiful Soup library to locate and isolate the desired HTML element, then utilize the
.textmethod and.split()function to obtain and parse the pagination content. - Convert extracted pagination values from strings into integers to avoid potential data processing errors, setting the foundation for looping through multiple pages to retrieve comprehensive data.
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Let's take a look at how we could do this step-by-step. First step would absolutely be doing a little exploration to figure out how can we hook into this element. Let's inspect it.
It is an LI, that's the name of the tag, LI, just like, you know, P tags and A tags and H3s that we've been working with. LI, and it has an attribute to identify a class of current. That's the one with the class of next, that's not this one.
But class equals current. That's got the text in it we want, page 1 of 50. Alright, let's take a look.
Now that we know it's LI with a class of current, we could say pagination element, sure, equals soup.find. We just want to find one. Find the LI with the class of current. Alright, that should do that.
Now I want the text in it. And it's, I'm just going to do, I'm going to break this up. It could potentially be done all in one line or two.
Let's do it in three. That's the text that's in it. And now for our bonus, which we definitely want to do, I want to get, or we ultimately want to get, what is the maximum number of pages? It's that pagination content, but I want it split into words.
And that's what .split will do. It will take a list and make it into a list of strings. Now that it's a list, I could say I want the last, now it's a list of words.
And we can check that out. Give me pagination max, page one of 50, list of words. I want the last word in that list, so after I split it, give me index negative one.
And there it is. Ooh, it is the string 50. We should probably make it the integer version of all of that.
And there we go. Not a string now. That could have run us into trouble later.
Okay, we're going to next, our next step, take this and do a very complex and beautiful loop to make, to hit up every single page in this element, in this page, on this site. Every single page on this site, and get all that beautiful data.