craigslistscraper 1.0.1

Webscraper for Craigslist

CraigslistScraper

Note: CraigslistScraper is for personal use and data science only.

Craigslist Scraper is a web scraper for craigslist, Users define their searches then Craigslist Scraper pulls all ads and ad data from the defined search and places it neatly inside of a JSON file. The files that are created might look something like:

data
    ├── 14-aug-2020
    │   ├── bmw_14:Aug:2020-11:04:01.json
    │   ├── audi_14:Aug:2020-18:03:21.json
    │   └── iphone_14:Aug:2020-11:04:07.json
    ├── 15-aug-2020
    └── 16-aug-2020
        └── iphone_15:Aug:2020-12:06:02.json

Where each JSON file might contain data that looks like:

Only tested on macOS with python3.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Installation
• Usage
• Analyzing
• License

Installation

For macOS:

To install the package just run pip install craigslistscraper in terminal, I recommend the use of Python's virtual enviroments when installing any package whether it be craigslist scraper or any other package. For Craigslist Scraper to run properly it needs Beautifulsoup4, Requests, and Pandas. In later updates I plan to have Numpy be included too.

Not tested on Windows or Linux

Usage

Example of usage:

from craigslistscraper import Searches

if __name__ == '__main__': # Required to run inside of "if name == main"
  filters = ['&postedToday=1'] # Optional

  cities = ['city1', 'city2'] # Required

  # car_data=False by default and doesn't need to be defined explicitly.
  foo = Searches("your search", cities "section", filters, car_data=False)

  foo.compile_search()

Note #1: Filters does not have to be defined or passed in as an argument, and will by default be assigned '&postedToday=1'

Note #2: For a list of cities view the craigslistscraper/city_data/craigslist_cities_list.csv file

Note #3: For more filters, check out the FILTERS.md file.

For craigslistscraper to function properly you NEED to run it inside of if __name__ == '__main__' because of a multiprocessing error that occurs if you don't, this will be fixed in a future update.

If your using this scraper to look at car data I recommend putting car_data=True at the end of foo in the example above, as it'll give more complete json data which is easier to work with when converting to csv files.

Analyzing

Data can easily be converted to CSV

This data can then be analyzed, some examples include:

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.