Develop Reference

How to find the total number of pages on a website with BeautifulSoup?

Context: I'm working on pagination of this website: https://skoodos.com/schools-in-uttarakhand. When I inspected, this website has no proper number of pages visible except the next button which is ?page=2 after the url. Also, searching for page-link gave me number 20 at the end. So I assumed that the total number of pages is 20, upon checking manually, I learnt that, there only exist 11 pages.
After many trials and errors, I finally decided to go with just the indexing from 0 until 12 (12 is excluded by python however).
What I want to know is that, how wold you go about figuring out the number of pages on a particular website that doesn't show the actual number of pages other than previous and next button and how can I optimize this in terms of the same?
Here's my solution to pagination. Any way to optimize this other than me manually finding the number of pages?
from myWork.commons import url_parser, write
def data_fetch(url):
school_info = []
for page_number in range(0, 4):
next_web_page = url + f'?page={page_number}'
soup = url_parser(next_web_page)
search_results = soup.find('section', {'id': 'search-results'}).find(class_='container').find(class_='row')
# rest of the code
for page_number in range(4, 12):
next_web_page = url + f'?page={page_number}'
soup = url_parser(next_web_page)
search_results = soup.find('section', {'id': 'search-results'}).find(class_='container').find(class_='row')
# rest of the code
def main():
url = "https://skoodos.com/schools-in-uttarakhand"
data_fetch(url)
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()

Each of your pages (except the last one) will have an element like this:
<a class="page-link"
href="https://skoodos.com/schools-in-uttarakhand?page=2"
rel="next">Next »</a>
E.g. you can extract the link as follows (here for the first page):
link = soup.find('a', class_='page-link', href=True, rel='next')
print(link['href'])
https://skoodos.com/schools-in-uttarakhand?page=2
So, you could make your function recursive. E.g. use something like this:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
def data_fetch(url, results = list()):
resp = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.content, 'lxml')
search_results = soup.find('section', {'id': 'search-results'})\
.find(class_='container').find(class_='row')
results.append(search_results)
link = soup.find('a', class_='page-link', href=True, rel='next')
# link will be `None` for last page (i.e. `page=11`)
if link:
# just adding some prints to show progress of iteration
if not 'page' in url:
print('getting page: 1', end=', ')
url = link['href']
# subsequent page nums being retrieved
print(f'{url.rsplit("=", maxsplit=1)[1]}', end=', ')
# recursive call
return data_fetch(url, results)
else:
# `page=11` with no link, we're done
print('done')
return results
url = 'https://skoodos.com/schools-in-uttarakhand'
data = data_fetch(url)
So, a call to this function will print progress as:
getting page: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, done
And you'll end up with data with 11x bs4.element.Tag, one for each page.
print(len(data))
11
print(set([type(d) for d in data]))
{<class 'bs4.element.Tag'>}
Good luck with extracting the required info; the site is very slow, and the HTML is particularly sloppy and inconsistent. (e.g. you're right to note there is a page-link elem, which suggests there are 20 pages. But its visibility is set to hidden, so apparently this is just a piece of deprecated/unused code.)

There's a bit at the top that says "Showing the 217 results as per selected criteria". You can code to extract the number from that, then count the number number of results per page and divide by that to get the expected number of pages (don't forget to round up ).
If you want to double check, add more code to go to the calculated last page and
if there's no such page, keep decrementing the total and checking until you hit a page that exists
if there is such a page, but it has an active/enabled "Next" button, keep going to Next page until reaching the last (basically as you are now)
(Remember that the two listed above are contingencies and wouldn't be executed in an ideal scenario.)
So, just to find the number of pages, you could do something like:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import math
def soupFromUrl(scrapeUrl):
req = requests.get(scrapeUrl)
if req.status_code == 200:
return BeautifulSoup(req.text, 'html.parser')
else:
raise Exception(f'{req.reason} - failed to scrape {scrapeUrl}')
def getPageTotal(url):
soup = soupFromUrl(url)
#totalResults = int(soup.find('label').get_text().split('(')[-1].split(')')[0])
totalResults = int(soup.p.strong.get_text()) # both searches should work
perPageResults = len(soup.select('.m-show')) #probably always 20
print(f'{perPageResults} of {totalResults} results per page')
if not (perPageResults > 0 and totalResults > 0):
return 0
lastPageNum = math.ceil(totalResults/perPageResults)
# Contingencies - will hopefully never be needed
lpSoup = soupFromUrl(f'{url}?page={lastPageNum}')
if lpSoup.select('.m-show'): #page exists
while lpSoup.select_one('a[rel="next"]'):
nextLink = lpSoup.select_one('a[rel="next"]')['href']
lastPageNum = int(nextLink.split('page=')[-1])
lpSoup = soupFromUrl(nextLink)
else: #page does not exist
while not (lpSoup.select('.m-show') or lastPageNum < 1):
lastPageNum = lastPageNum - 1
lpSoup = soupFromUrl(f'{url}?page={lastPageNum}')
# end Contingencies section
return lastPageNum
However, it looks like you only want the total pages in order to start the for-loop, but it's not even necessary to use a for-loop at all - a while-loop might be better:
def data_fetch(url):
school_info = []
nextUrl = url
while nextUrl:
soup = soupFromUrl(nextUrl)
#GET YOUR DATA FROM PAGE
nextHL = soup.select_one('a[rel="next"]')
nextUrl = nextHL.get('href') if nextHL else None
# code after fetching all pages' data
Although, you could still use for-loop if you had a maximum page number in mind:
def data_fetch(url, maxPages):
school_info = []
for p in range(1, maxPages+1):
soup = soupFromUrl(f'{url}?page={p}')
if not soup.select('.m-show'):
break
#GET YOUR DATA FROM PAGE
# code after fetching all pages' data [upto max]

Web crawler does not open all links in a page

I'am trying to build a web crawler using beautifulsoup and urllib. The crawler is working, but it does not open all the pages in a site. It opens the first link and goes to that link, opens the first link of that page and so on.
Here's my code:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib.request import urlopen
from urllib.parse import urljoin
import json, sys
sys.setrecursionlimit(10000)
url = input('enter url ')
d = {}
d_2 = {}
l = []
url_base = url
count = 0
def f(url):
global count
global url_base
if count <= 100:
print("count: " + str(count))
print('now looking into: '+url+'\n')
count += 1
l.append(url)
html = urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
d[count] = soup
tags = soup('a')
for tag in tags:
meow = tag.get('href',None)
if (urljoin(url, meow) in l):
print("Skipping this one: " + urljoin(url,meow))
elif "mailto" in urljoin(url,meow):
print("Skipping this one with a mailer")
elif meow == None:
print("skipping 'None'")
elif meow.startswith('http') == False:
f(urljoin(url, meow))
else:
f(meow)
else:
return
f(url)
print('\n\n\n\n\n')
print('Scrapping Completed')
print('\n\n\n\n\n')

The reason you're seeing this behavior is due to when the code recursively calls your function. As soon as the code finds a valid link, the function f gets called again preventing the rest of the for loop from running until it returns.
What you're doing is a depth first search, but the internet is very deep. You want to do a breadth first search instead.
Probably the easiest way to modify your code to do that is to have a global list of links to follow. Have the for loop append all the scraped links to the end of this list and then outside of the for loop, remove the first element of the list and follow that link.
You may have to change your logic slightly for your max count.

If count reaches 100, no further links will be opened. Therefore I think you should decrease count by one after leaving the for loop. If you do this, count would be something like the current link depth (and 100 would be the maximum link depth).
If the variable count should refer to the number of opened links, then you might want to control the link depth in another way.

Python index function

I am writing a simple Python program which grabs a webpage and finds all the URL links in it. However I try to index the starting and ending delimiter (") of each href link but the ending one always indexed wrong.
# open a url and find all the links in it
import urllib2
url=urllib2.urlopen('right.html')
urlinfo = url.info()
urlcontent = url.read()
bodystart = urlcontent.index('<body')
print 'body starts at',bodystart
bodycontent = urlcontent[bodystart:].lower()
print bodycontent
linklist = []
n = bodycontent.index('<a href=')
while n:
print n
bodycontent = bodycontent[n:]
a = bodycontent.index('"')
b = bodycontent[(a+1):].index('"')
print a, b
linklist.append(bodycontent[(a+1):b])
n = bodycontent[b:].index('<a href=')
print linklist

I would suggest using a html parsing library instead of manually searching the DOM String.
Beautiful Soup is an excellent library for this purpose. Here is the reference link
With bs your link searching functionality could look like:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(bodycontent, 'html.parser')
linklist = [a.get('href') for a in soup.find_all('a')]

Python Link Scraper

focus_Search = raw_input("Focus Search ")
url = "https://www.google.com/search?q="
res = requests.get(url + focus_Search)
print("You Just Searched")
res_String = res.text
#Now I must get ALL the sections of code that start with "<a href" and end with "/a>"
Im trying to scrape all the links from a google search webpage. I could extract each link one at a time but I'm sure theres a better way to do it.

This creates a list of all links in the search page with some of your code, without getting into BeautifulSoup
import requests
import lxml.html
focus_Search = input("Focus Search ")
url = "https://www.google.com/search?q="
#focus_Search
res = requests.get(url + focus_Search).content
# res
dom = lxml.html.fromstring(res)
links = [x for x in dom.xpath('//a/#href')] # Borrows from cheekybastard in link below
# http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1080411/retrieve-links-from-web-page-using-python-and-beautifulsoup
links

Recursive function gives no output

I'm scraping all the URL of my domain with recursive function.
But it outputs nothing, without any error.
#usr/bin/python
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
import tldextract
def scrape(url):
for links in url:
main_domain = tldextract.extract(links)
r = requests.get(links)
data = r.text
soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
for href in soup.find_all('a'):
href = href.get('href')
if not href:
continue
link_domain = tldextract.extract(href)
if link_domain.domain == main_domain.domain :
problem.append(href)
elif not href == '#' and link_domain.tld == '':
new = 'http://www.'+ main_domain.domain + '.' + main_domain.tld + '/' + href
problem.append(new)
return len(problem)
return scrape(problem)
problem = ["http://xyzdomain.com"]
print(scrape(problem))
When I create a new list, it works, but I don't want to make a list every time for every loop.

You need to structure your code so that it meets the pattern for recursion as your current code doesn't - you also should not call variables the same name as libraries, e.g. href = href.get() because this will usually stop the library working as it becomes the variable, your code as it currently is will only ever return the len() as this return is unconditionally reached before: return scrap(problem).:
def Recursive(Factorable_problem)
if Factorable_problem is Simplest_Case:
return AnswerToSimplestCase
else:
return Rule_For_Generating_From_Simpler_Case(Recursive(Simpler_Case))
for example:
def Factorial(n):
""" Recursively Generate Factorials """
if n < 2:
return 1
else:
return n * Factorial(n-1)

Hello I've made a none recursive version of this that appears to get all the links on the same domain.
The code below I've tested using the problem included in the code. When I'd solved the problems with the recursive version the next problem was hitting the recursion depth limit so I rewrote it so it ran in an iterative fashion, the code and result below:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
import tldextract
def print_domain_info(d):
print "Main Domain:{0} \nSub Domain:{1} \nSuffix:{2}".format(d.domain,d.subdomain,d.suffix)
SEARCHED_URLS = []
problem = [ "http://Noelkd.neocities.org/", "http://youpi.neocities.org/"]
while problem:
# Get a link from the stack of links
link = problem.pop()
# Check we haven't been to this address before
if link in SEARCHED_URLS:
continue
# We don't want to come back here again after this point
SEARCHED_URLS.append(link)
# Try and get the website
try:
req = requests.get(link)
except:
# If its not working i don't care for it
print "borked website found: {0}".format(link)
continue
# Now we get to this point worth printing something
print "Trying to parse:{0}".format(link)
print "Status Code:{0} Thats: {1}".format(req.status_code, "A-OK" if req.status_code == 200 else "SOMTHINGS UP" )
# Get the domain info
dInfo = tldextract.extract(link)
print_domain_info(dInfo)
# I like utf-8
data = req.text.encode("utf-8")
print "Lenght Of Data Retrived:{0}".format(len(data)) # More info
soup = BeautifulSoup(data) # This was here before so i left it.
print "Found {0} link{1}".format(len(soup.find_all('a')),"s" if len(soup.find_all('a')) > 1 else "")
FOUND_THIS_ITERATION = [] # Getting the same links over and over was boring
found_links = [x for x in soup.find_all('a') if x.get('href') not in SEARCHED_URLS] # Find me all the links i don't got
for href in found_links:
href = href.get('href') # You wrote this seems to work well
if not href:
continue
link_domain = tldextract.extract(href)
if link_domain.domain == dInfo.domain: # JUST FINDING STUFF ON SAME DOMAIN RIGHT?!
if href not in FOUND_THIS_ITERATION: # I'ma check you out next time
print "Check out this link: {0}".format(href)
print_domain_info(link_domain)
FOUND_THIS_ITERATION.append(href)
problem.append(href)
else: # I got you already
print "DUPE LINK!"
else:
print "Not on same domain moving on"
# Count down
print "We have {0} more sites to search".format(len(problem))
if problem:
continue
else:
print "Its been fun"
print "Lets see the URLS we've visited:"
for url in SEARCHED_URLS:
print url
Which prints, after a lot of other logging loads of neocities websites!
What's happening is the script is popping a value of the list of websites yet to visit, it then gets all the links on the page which are on the same domain. If those links are to pages we haven't visited we add the link to the list of links to be visited. After we do that we pop the next page and do the same thing again until there are no pages left to visit.
Think this is what your looking for, get back to us in the comments if this doesn't work in the way that you want or if anyone can improve please leave a comment.