Table of Contents
Scraping URLs from a Webpage: Intro
In case you are our reader, you know that internet sites are full of valuable data and it can be extracted for various purposes. Today URLs attracted our attention, being a precious data asset, especially if the information you are interested in spans through multiple pages with the same page structure. Scraping all links from a website may come in handy when you scrape:
So, let’s find out how to extract all URLs from a website.
Free Web Scraping Solutions to Download a List of URLs
At present, you can find a wide range of free tools that may help you download all URLs from a website. You may choose the solution to match your target sites, Octoparse, BeautifulSoup, ParseHub are just some of the scrapers worth your consideration. You can also use Python or Selenium to scrape all links from a website. Most of them allow the users to get a list of URLs from a site in CSV, Excel, or JSON file formats.
Let’s now check how you can practically deal with a list of URLs download.
Loop Over the Page Number
We mention this method first, since it’s the simplest and the most straightforward. This is the case when a URL contains a page number at the end: page=1 for the first, page=2 for the second, then page=3, and so on.
In our example, selenium should be used. All we do is create a “for” loop
where the very last number changes. It will collect the data we specified
for each page. Naturally, you’ll need to cleanse data before it becomes
usable, but it’s a usual routine for any scraped content.
Create a List of URLs to Download Manually and Loop Over
With pages that do not have page numbers in their URL, the task becomes more complicated. However, if you really need the specific information contained there, you should look for the way around. One of the options is to create a list of URLs for download manually and a new “for” loop for it.
Going over every element it will collect the necessary information similarly
to the method described above. However, you can guess it’s not the best
solution when you need to scrape hundreds or even thousands of URLs. Then
you need to use a smarter approach to solve the challenge.
Loop Over a Scraped List of URLs
How to download a list of URLs if there are a lot of them. This method works best for the listings where href attribute can help to extract links from a webpage. Href attributes specify the links to separate pages and so by creating a loop “for” them you can extract the data you want.
The first step would be to find all URLs on a website and scrape them, next
you’ll need to generate a list of the collected URLs and then create another
loop to go over this list and extract the details required. The final step
is as usual to clean the data and form the final dataset.
