Fixing BeautifulSoup Iteration to Get Unique Film Titles with Python

Learn how to properly iterate through web pages using `BeautifulSoup` to scrape unique film titles in Python. This guide provides a detailed solution to common scraping issues.
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This video is based on the question https://stackoverflow.com/q/64630847/ asked by the user 'Cox Tox' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/7388306/ ) and on the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/64630924/ provided by the user 'Andrej Kesely' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/10035985/ ) at 'Stack Overflow' website. Thanks to these great users and Stackexchange community for their contributions.

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Fixing BeautifulSoup Iteration to Get Unique Film Titles with Python

When working with web scraping in Python using libraries like BeautifulSoup, you may encounter unexpected results. One common issue arises when trying to scrape multiple pages of data, only to find that the same data appears repeatedly. This guide addresses a specific question many developers face: Why does my code return the same film title (the title from the first page) when iterating through web pages?

Understanding the Problem

In the original code, the intent is to scrape film titles from multiple pages of a website. However, upon execution, the output remains identical across iterations, reflecting only the titles from the first page.

The Original Code

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

What Went Wrong?

The issue here lies in how the data is loaded on the target website. The pages do not generate unique URLs by page number; instead, they load content dynamically via Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). As a result, simply changing the URL does not yield any different content.

The Solution: Correctly Adjusting for Ajax Requests

To effectively scrape the titles, you need to target the Ajax URLs that the web application actually calls to retrieve data for each page. Below is the updated code that successfully accesses unique film titles from the multiple pages.

Updated Code

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Explanation of the Changes

Changing the URL:

The new base URL uses sc2/liste/772407/page-{}.ajax to correctly point to the data that gets loaded when a new page is accessed.

Fetching Content:

The code uses the requests library to fetch the page content, which is often simpler for making HTTP requests than using urllib2.

Parsing with BeautifulSoup:

The same BeautifulSoup logic is kept, which looks for li elements with the specific class that contains the film titles.

Output

When you run this corrected code, you should see a unique list of film titles printed in the console:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Conclusion

Web scraping can be tricky, especially when working with dynamically loaded content using Ajax. By understanding how the website retrieves data and adjusting your code appropriately, you can effectively gather unique information from multiple pages. Now, you can confidently tackle similar challenges in your web scraping endeavors!

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