Scraping Craigslist Listings with C++

This article explains how to scrape Craigslist apartment listings using C++ and the libcurl and libxml2 libraries. We'll go through each part of the code.

First install libcurl and libxml2 if needed.

Include the headers:

#include <curl/curl.h>
#include <libxml/HTMLparser.h>

libcurl handles HTTP requests. libxml2 parses HTML/XML.

Next set the URL to scrape:

const char* url = "<https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa>";

Use libcurl to fetch the page content:

CURL* curl = curl_easy_init();
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, url);

std::string html;
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, writeCallback);
curl_easy_perform(curl);

Parse the HTML with libxml2:

htmlDocPtr doc = htmlReadMemory(html.c_str(), html.size(), "", NULL, HTML_PARSE_NOBLANKS | HTML_PARSE_NOERROR | HTML_PARSE_NOWARNING | HTML_PARSE_NONET);

If you check the source code of Craigslist listings you can see that the listings area code looks something like this…

You can see the code block that generates the listing…

<li class="cl-static-search-result" title="Situated in Sunnyvale!, Recycling Center, 1/BD">
            <a href="https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/apa/d/santa-clara-situated-in-sunnyvale/7666802370.html">
                <div class="title">Situated in Sunnyvale!, Recycling Center, 1/BD</div>

                <div class="details">
                    <div class="price">$2,150</div>
                    <div class="location">
                        sunnyvale
                    </div>
                </div>
            </a>
        </li>

its encapsulated in the cl-static-search-result class. We also need to get the title class div and the price and location class divs to get all the data

Find all listings using XPath:

xmlXPathContextPtr xpathCtx = xmlXPathNewContext(doc);
xmlXPathObjectPtr xpathObj = xmlXPathEvalExpression("//li[@class='cl-static-search-result']", xpathCtx);

Loop through listings and extract info:

for(int i = 0; i < xpathObj->nodesetval->nodeNr; i++) {

  xmlNodePtr node = xpathObj->nodesetval->nodeTab[i];

  xmlChar* title = xmlGetProp(node, "title");
  xmlChar* price = xmlGetProp(node, "price");
  xmlChar* location = xmlGetProp(node, "location");

  xmlNodePtr linkNode = node->xmlChildrenNode;
  xmlChar* link = xmlGetProp(linkNode, "href");

  std::cout << title << " " << price << " " << location << " " << link << std::endl;

  xmlFree(title);
  xmlFree(price);
  xmlFree(location);
  xmlFree(link);

}

The full C++ code is:

#include <curl/curl.h>
#include <libxml/HTMLparser.h>

const char* url = "<https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa>";

CURL* curl = curl_easy_init();
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, url);

std::string html;
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, writeCallback);
curl_easy_perform(curl);

htmlDocPtr doc = htmlReadMemory(html.c_str(), html.size(), "", NULL, HTML_PARSE_NOBLANKS | HTML_PARSE_NOERROR | HTML_PARSE_NOWARNING | HTML_PARSE_NONET);

xmlXPathContextPtr xpathCtx = xmlXPathNewContext(doc);
xmlXPathObjectPtr xpathObj = xmlXPathEvalExpression("//li[@class='cl-static-search-result']", xpathCtx);

for(int i = 0; i < xpathObj->nodesetval->nodeNr; i++) {

  xmlNodePtr node = xpathObj->nodesetval->nodeTab[i];

  xmlChar* title = xmlGetProp(node, "title");
  xmlChar* price = xmlGetProp(node, "price");
  xmlChar* location = xmlGetProp(node, "location");

  xmlNodePtr linkNode = node->xmlChildrenNode;
  xmlChar* link = xmlGetProp(linkNode, "href");

  std::cout << title << " " << price << " " << location << " " << link << std::endl;

  xmlFree(title);
  xmlFree(price);
  xmlFree(location);
  xmlFree(link);

}

This walks through scraping Craigslist in C++.

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Scraping Craigslist Listings with C++

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