In this article, we will learn how to scrape property listings from Booking.com using Scala. We will use Scala libraries like sttp and Scalatags to fetch the HTML content and parse/extract details like property name, location, ratings etc.
Prerequisites
To follow along, you will need:
Adding Dependencies
We will use sttp for sending HTTP requests and Scalatags for parsing HTML.
Add them to
libraryDependencies ++= Seq(
"com.softwaremill.sttp.client" %% "core" % "1.6.6",
"com.lihaoyi" %% "scalatags" % "0.6.7"
)
This will download the packages when building the project.
Importing Libraries
Import the required classes and libraries:
import sttp.client._
import scalatags.Text.all._
Defining the URL
—
Define the target URL to scrape:
val url = "<https://www.booking.com/searchresults.en-gb.html?ss=New+York&checkin=2023-03-01&checkout=2023-03-05&group_adults=2>"
Setting User Agent
Set a valid User Agent header:
val userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.102 Safari/537.36"
Fetching the Page
Use sttp to send a request and get the response:
val backend = HttpURLConnectionBackend()
val response = basicRequest
.get(uri"$url")
.header("User-Agent", userAgent)
.send(backend)
We configure the backend, headers and send the request.
Parsing the HTML
Load the HTML into a Scalatags tree:
val html = response.body
val page = scalatags.Text(html)
Extracting Cards
Get elements with
val cards = page \\\\ "div" attribute("data-testid" -> "property-card")
This extracts the property card divs.
Processing Each Card
Loop through the cards:
cards.foreach { card =>
// Extract data from card
}
Inside we can extract the details from each
Extracting Title
Get the
val title = (card \\ "h3").text
Extracting Location
Get the address
val location = (card \\ "span" attribute("data-testid" -> "address")).text
Extracting Rating
Get
val rating = (card \\ "div" class "e4755bbd60").attr("aria-label")
Filter by CSS class.
Extracting Review Count
Get text of the
val reviewCount = (card \\ "div" class "abf093bdfe").text
Extracting Description
Get the description div text:
val description = (card \\ "div" class "d7449d770c").text
Printing the Data
Print out the extracted details:
println(s"Name: $title")
println(s"Location: $location")
println(s"Rating: $rating")
println(s"Review Count: $reviewCount")
println(s"Description: $description")
Full Script
Here is the complete scraping script:
import sttp.client._
import scalatags.Text.all._
val url = "<https://www.booking.com/searchresults.en-gb.html?ss=New+York&checkin=2023-03-01&checkout=2023-03-05&group_adults=2>"
val userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.102 Safari/537.36"
val backend = HttpURLConnectionBackend()
val response = basicRequest
.get(uri"$url")
.header("User-Agent", userAgent)
.send(backend)
val html = response.body
val page = scalatags.Text(html)
val cards = page \\\\ "div" attribute("data-testid" -> "property-card")
cards.foreach { card =>
val title = (card \\ "h3").text
val location = (card \\ "span" attribute("data-testid" -> "address")).text
val rating = (card \\ "div" class "e4755bbd60").attr("aria-label")
val reviewCount = (card \\ "div" class "abf093bdfe").text
val description = (card \\ "div" class "d7449d770c").text
println(s"Name: $title")
println(s"Location: $location")
println(s"Rating: $rating")
println(s"Review Count: $reviewCount")
println(s"Description: $description")
}
This scrapes and extracts key data from Booking.com listings using Scala. The same approach can be used for any website.
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