Craigslist_Scraper

Scrape data from Craigslist for data analysis.

Category Scraping

The Output Directory Structure is as follows:

category
└── category_A
    └── state_A
        └── city_A
            ├── post_overview_Date_Time.json
            └── post_detail_Date_Time.json
    └── state_B
        └── city_B
            ├── post_overview_Date_Time.json
            └── post_detail_Date_Time.json
    ...

Design Notes

Scraping is done in 2 steps:

1. Overview step - For a search URL, download the high-level post info (e.g. title, url) for each post.
2. Detail step - For each post URL, navigate to it, and download the details of the post.

The process is split into 2 individual steps to support caching in the future. An obvious use case is to pull down new posts without making uneccesary calls if we have already downloaded the details of a post.

Also, this approach decouples the two steps which will make development and debugging easier in the future when handling data in bulk.

Sensitive Identifiers

Some information is obtained using named identifiers that, if craigslist were to change, would break the code. This section lists those values for easier tracking.

data-img-id attribute is used to obtain image URLs from post details page.

• EX.

 <a class="thumb" data-imgid="98xLfSGDIzq_0jm0t2" href="https://images.craigslist.org/00303_98xLfSGDIzq_0jm0t2_600x450.jpg" id="1_thumb_98xLfSGDIzq_0jm0t2" title="1"><img alt="1" class="selected" src="https://images.craigslist.org/00303_98xLfSGDIzq_0jm0t2_50x50c.jpg"/></a>,

Images

The surface images are displayed at a resolution of 600 x 450. Clicking on the image will enlarge it, usually making it 1200 x 900. However, enlarging an image is not always available. The image URL encodes the size information, EX:

• https://images.craigslist.org/00o0o_5ej82vPO9kT_**600x450**.jpg
• https://images.craigslist.org/00o0o_5ej82vPO9kT_**1200x900**.jpg

The available sizes are listed in the javascript code, EX:

var imageConfig = {
    "4": {
        "hostname": "https://images.craigslist.org", 
        "sizes":["50x50c","300x300","600x450","1200x900"]
        }
};

Because 600 x 450 is large enough for most image processing applications and because we prefer not to parse javascript code, we only take the lower-quality images.

If higher quality images become necessary, a few solutions:

1. Parse the javascript code to get all available image URLs.
2. Try to modify the image sizes in the URL directly, and use brute-force to see which do not return a 404 error. This is probably easier since there are likely a small set of available image sizes.

TODO

Search category by:

1. a city in a state
2. every city in a state
3. every city in every state

Only write new results, by running diff against previous data within a category.