Python Web Scraping in Pagination in Single Page Application

In this tutorial, we'll learn how to perform web scraping in a Single Page Application (SPA) that uses pagination. We'll use Python and some popular libraries like requests and BeautifulSoup to extract data from a website that loads content dynamically through AJAX requests as you scroll through the pages.
Before we begin, ensure you have the following libraries installed. You can install them using pip:
Single Page Applications (SPAs) are websites that load content dynamically using JavaScript and AJAX requests, making traditional web scraping techniques less effective. When a website uses pagination in an SPA, it typically fetches additional data from the server as the user scrolls down or clicks on the "Load More" button.
To scrape data from such a website, we need to inspect the network traffic to understand how the data is fetched. We'll typically find an API endpoint that provides the data we need, and we can simulate requests to this endpoint to retrieve the data for different pages.
First, inspect the website and identify the API endpoint that provides the data you want to scrape. You can use your browser's developer tools (usually found by pressing F12 or right-clicking and selecting "Inspect") to monitor network requests as you interact with the site. Look for requests that fetch data when you scroll or click "Next."
Once you've identified the API endpoint, you can use the requests library in Python to make GET requests to that endpoint. In this example, we'll assume the API returns JSON data. Replace the url with the actual API endpoint from the website you're scraping.
Once you have retrieved the data, parse it to extract the information you need. We can use the json library to parse JSON data and extract relevant information.
You can control the pagination by monitoring the API responses. In the example above, we increment the page variable in the URL parameters for each subsequent request until no more data is returned.
Finally, you can save the scraped data to a file, a database, or process it as needed. For example, you can save the data to a CSV file using the csv module:
This code example illustrates how to scrape data from an SPA with pagination in Python. Replace the API endpoint