This article explains how to scrape Craigslist apartment listings using Ruby and the Nokogiri gem. We'll go through each line of code.
First install Nokogiri:
gem install nokogiri
And require it in your script:
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
Nokogiri allows us to parse HTML and XML in Ruby.
We'll scrape the Craigslist SF apartment listings:
url = '<https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa>'
Use open-uri to fetch the page content:
page = open(url)
Parse the HTML with Nokogiri:
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(page)
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:
listings = doc.css('li.cl-static-search-result')
Loop through listings to extract info:
listings.each do |listing|
title = listing.at_css('.title').text
price = listing.at_css('.price').text
location = listing.at_css('.location').text
link = listing.at_css('a')['href']
puts "#{title} #{price} #{location} #{link}"
end
The full Ruby code is:
require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'
url = '<https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa>'
page = open(url)
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(page)
listings = doc.css('li.cl-static-search-result')
listings.each do |listing|
title = listing.at_css('.title').text
price = listing.at_css('.price').text
location = listing.at_css('.location').text
link = listing.at_css('a')['href']
puts "#{title} #{price} #{location} #{link}"
end
This walks through the Ruby code to scrape Craigslist listings.
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