In web scraping, it is often necessary to scrape data from multiple pages. One common scenario is when a website has multiple pages of search results or when data is divided into multiple pages for better organization. In such cases, handling pagination becomes crucial.

The requests-html library in Python provides a convenient way to handle pagination and scrape data from multiple pages. In this blog post, we will explore how to use requests-html for paging in Python.

Installing requests-html

First, let’s make sure you have requests-html installed. Open your terminal and run the following command to install it using pip:

pip install requests-html

Setting Up requests-html

After installing requests-html, we need to import the necessary modules and set up a session to use the library:

from requests_html import HTMLSession

session = HTMLSession()

Scraping Multiple Pages with Paging

To scrape data from multiple pages, we need to follow these steps:

1. Define a base URL that represents the initial page.
2. Make a GET request to the base URL using the get() method of the session object.
3. Extract the necessary data from the response using HTML parsing techniques.
4. Check if there are more pages available.
5. If more pages are available, extract the URL of the next page and repeat steps 2-4.
6. If there are no more pages, stop scraping.

Here’s an example that demonstrates how to scrape data from multiple pages using requests-html:

base_url = 'https://example.com/search?page='
page_num = 1

while True:
    url = base_url + str(page_num)

    # Make a GET request to the page
    response = session.get(url)

    # Extract data from the response
    # Code for extracting data goes here...

    # Check if more pages are available
    if 'Next' not in response.html.links:
        break

    page_num += 1

session.close()

In this example, we start with the initial page by setting page_num to 1. Inside the while loop, we dynamically generate the URL of the next page by appending the page number to the base URL. We then make a GET request to the generated URL using the get() method.

After extracting the desired data from the response, we check if more pages are available by looking for a “Next” link in the response’s HTML. If the “Next” link is not present, we break out of the loop and stop scraping.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we explored how to handle pagination using requests-html in Python for scraping data from multiple pages. By following the steps and using the example code provided, you can easily scrape data from web pages with multiple pages. Happy scraping!