Website Data Scraping: Navigating Beyond the First Page

Extract the text indicating total pages and isolate its last word as the page count.

Unlock efficient ways to scrape data across multiple pages by mastering pagination techniques. Learn how to identify page count dynamically and loop effectively for comprehensive data extraction.

Key Insights

  • Use pagination indicators ("page 1 of 50") to dynamically determine the total number of pages to scrape, accommodating different search results.
  • Employ looping techniques to systematically navigate and request data from each page, ensuring a thorough extraction of information across entire websites.
  • Extract targeted text elements efficiently, such as identifying and retrieving the final page number, to streamline the data scraping process.

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What if we wanted to get all the results, not just from the first page, as discussed? We have this first page, we want more. And this is where, you know, some really amazing data scraping comes in. Because now we're talking about data scraping, but it's not even just one page, it's the whole site.

It's every single item in it. So, to do that, we have, there's an element down here, it says page 1 of 50. We need the text for this element.

And the reason we're going to need it is we're going to loop through and make a request each time. And when we do so, we're going to want to loop through 50 times. And we need to know how many pages there are.

And it might be different for different pages, different searches. If we want to search for historical fiction, that might be a different number of page results. We'll want to hit up every single page, and we won't necessarily know how many pages there are.

So, we're going to want to scrape and get just this one item here. This is the perfect use case for those times when you just want one item. So, your next challenge is to get the text in that element, this one down here.

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And as a bonus, get the last word of that text, which should be the actual number we want. Good luck, and we'll take a look at how to solve that in just a moment.

Colin Jaffe

Colin Jaffe is a programmer, writer, and teacher with a passion for creative code, customizable computing environments, and simple puns. He loves teaching code, from the fundamentals of algorithmic thinking to the business logic and user flow of application building—he particularly enjoys teaching JavaScript, Python, API design, and front-end frameworks.

Colin has taught code to a diverse group of students since learning to code himself, including young men of color at All-Star Code, elementary school kids at The Coding Space, and marginalized groups at Pursuit. He also works as an instructor for Noble Desktop, where he teaches classes in the Full-Stack Web Development Certificate and the Data Science & AI Certificate.

Colin lives in Brooklyn with his wife, two kids, and many intricate board games.

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