This article will explain how to scrape Craigslist apartment listings using Python and BeautifulSoup. We will go through each line of code to understand what it is doing.
First we import the requests and BeautifulSoup modules:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
Requests allows us to make HTTP requests to web pages. BeautifulSoup helps parse and navigate HTML and XML documents.
Next we set the URL to scrape - in this case Craigslist San Francisco apartment listings:
url = '<https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa>'
We make a GET request to fetch the page content:
response = requests.get(url)
Optionally, we can save the HTML content to a file for inspection:
with open('craigslist.html', 'w') as f:
f.write(response.text)
Now we can parse the page with BeautifulSoup. We pass in the response text and specify 'html.parser' to parse as HTML:
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
If you check the source code of Craigslist listings you can see that the listings area code looks something like this…
You can see the code block that generates the listing…
<li class="cl-static-search-result" title="Situated in Sunnyvale!, Recycling Center, 1/BD">
<a href="https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/apa/d/santa-clara-situated-in-sunnyvale/7666802370.html">
<div class="title">Situated in Sunnyvale!, Recycling Center, 1/BD</div>
<div class="details">
<div class="price">$2,150</div>
<div class="location">
sunnyvale
</div>
</div>
</a>
</li>its encapsulated in the cl-static-search-result class. We also need to get the title class div and the price and location class divs to get all the data
Craigslist organizes listings in
listings = soup.find_all('li', class_='cl-static-search-result')
We loop through each listing and extract the info we want - title, price, location, and link:
for listing in listings:
a_tag = listing.find('a')
link = a_tag['href']
title = listing.find('div', class_='title')
price = listing.find('div', class_='price')
location = listing.find('div', class_='location')
print(title.text, price.text, location.text, link)
The full code is:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = '<https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa>'
response = requests.get(url)
with open('craigslist.html', 'w') as f:
f.write(response.text)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
listings = soup.find_all('li', class_='cl-static-search-result')
for listing in listings:
a_tag = listing.find('a')
link = a_tag['href']
title = listing.find('div', class_='title')
price = listing.find('div', class_='price')
location = listing.find('div', class_='location')
print(title.text, price.text, location.text, link)
This walks through the code to scrape Craigslist apartment listings and extract key information from each listing.
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