Scraping Groupon with Python and Beautiful Soup

May 26th, 2020

Today we are going to see how we can scrape Groupon deal information using Python and BeautifulSoup in a simple and elegant manner.

The aim of this article is to get you started on a real-world problem solving while keeping it super simple so you get familiar and get practical results as fast as possible.

So the first thing we need is to make sure we have Python 3 installed. If not, you can just get Python 3 and get it installed before you proceed.

Then you can install beautiful soup with:

pip3 install beautifulsoup4

We will also need the libraries requests, lxml, and soupsieve to fetch data, break it down to XML, and to use CSS selectors. Install them using:

pip3 install requests soupsieve lxml

Once installed open an editor and type in:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

Now let's go to the Groupon page and inspect the data we can get.

This is how it looks:

Back to our code now. Let's try and get this data by pretending we are a browser like this:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

headers = {'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/601.3.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9',
'Accept-Encoding': 'identity'
}
#'Accept-Encoding': 'identity'

url = 'https://www.groupon.com/browse/greater-toronto-area'

response=requests.get(url,headers=headers)

Save this as scrapeGroupon.py.

If you run it:

python3 scrapeGroupon.py

You will see the whole HTML page.

Now, let's use CSS selectors to get to the data we want. To do that let's go back to Chrome and open the inspect tool. We now need to get to all the articles. We notice that the <div with the class 'cui-content' holds all the individual product details together.

If you notice, that the product title is contained inside the cui-udc-title class. We can get to it like this:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

headers = {'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/601.3.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9',
'Accept-Encoding': 'identity'
}
#'Accept-Encoding': 'identity'

url = 'https://www.groupon.com/browse/greater-toronto-area'

response=requests.get(url,headers=headers)

#print(response.content)

soup=BeautifulSoup(response.content,'lxml')


for item in soup.select('.cui-content'):
	try:
		print(item.select('.cui-udc-title')[0].get_text().strip())

		print('---------------------------')


	except Exception as e:
		#raise e
		print('')

So when you run it you get:

Bingo!! we got the product titles...

Now with the same process we get the class names of all the other data like product image, price, etc.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

headers = {'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/601.3.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9',
'Accept-Encoding': 'identity'
}
#'Accept-Encoding': 'identity'

url = 'https://www.groupon.com/browse/greater-toronto-area'

response=requests.get(url,headers=headers)

#print(response.content)

soup=BeautifulSoup(response.content,'lxml')


for item in soup.select('.cui-content'):
	try:
		print(item.select('.cui-udc-title')[0].get_text().strip())
		print(item.select('.cui-price-original')[0].get_text().strip())
		print(item.select('.cui-price-discount')[0].get_text().strip())
		print(item.select('.cui-image')[0]['data-srcset'])
		print('---------------------------')


	except Exception as e:
		#raise e
		print('')

That when run, should print everything we need from each product like this:

That was fun.

If you want to use this in production and want to scale to thousands of links then you will find that you will get IP blocked easily by Groupon. In this scenario using a rotating proxy service to rotate IPs is almost a must. You can use a service like Proxies API to route your calls through a pool of millions of residential proxies.

If you want to scale the crawling speed and dont want to set up your own infrastructure, you can use our Cloud base crawler crawltohell.com to easily crawl thousands of URLs at high speed from our network of crawlers.

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