Web Scraping Case Study | Crawling data from Rakuten Global Market

Wednesday, May 10, 2017 12:46 PM

Graphic tutorial

In this tutorial, we will walk through the detailed steps to crawl data from retail website, rakuten.com.

List of features covered

Set up pagination
Build a loop list
Modify XPath

Now, let's get started!

Step 1. Set up basic information

Click "Quick Start "
Create a new task in the Advanced Mode
Complete the basic information

Step 2. Navigate to the target website

Enter the target URL in the built-in browser (URL of the example: http://global.rakuten.com/en/category/100040/?p=1&l-id=rgm-top-en-nav-electronics-laptop)
Click "Go" icon to open webpage

Step 3. Create a list of items

Move your cursor over the products with similar layout, where you would extract the data info from.

Click any where on the first section on the web page
When prompted, Click “Create a list of items” (sections with similar layout)
Click “Add current item to the list”

Now, the first item has been added to the list, we need to finish adding all items to the list

Click “Continue to edit the list”
Click a second section with similar layout
Click “Add current item to the list” again

Now we get all the sections added to the list with similar layout

Click “Finish Creating List”
Click “loop”， this action will tell Octoparse to click on each section on the list to extract the selected data

Note: If The selection had not been identified properly in the first place. We need to click “Expand the selection area” to the point where the outlined box includes all the content you want to crawl.

Step 4. Select the data to be extracted and rename data fields

Click the data field “Product Description”
Select “Extract text”
Follow the same steps to extract the other data field
Rename the any field names if necessary
Click "Save"

Step 5. Set up Pagination

To extract from multiple pages, we'll need to configure for pagination, meaning, we will tell Octoparse to scrape from the first page to the last page.

Click on "»" located to the right of page numbers
Choose "Loop Click Next Page"

Step 6. Modify XPath to locate next page

In some cases, pagination does not work correctly because the auto-generated XPath is not accurate. Hence, we'll need to manually figure out the proper XPath to use and modify the setting for "click to paginate".

First, we want to make sure we are on the first page so we can proceed to extract from all the other pages.
Expand the "Advanced options" pane under "Click to paginate", paste the Xpath : .//*[@id='contents']/div/div[2]/div[4]/ul/li/a[contains(text(),"»")] into the “Single Element” text box.
Click "Save"

Step 7. Starting running your task