learn-co-students / dsc-scraping-concerts-lab-online-ds-ft-090919

Scraping Concerts - Lab

Introduction

Now that you've seen how to scrape a simple website, it's time to again practice those skills on a full-fledged site!

In this lab, you'll practice your scraping skills on an online music magazine and events website called Resident Advisor.

Objectives

You will be able to:

• Create a full scraping pipeline that involves traversing over many pages of a website, dealing with errors and storing data

View the Website

For this lab, you'll be scraping the https://ra.co website. For reproducibility we will use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to retrieve a version of this page from March 2019.

Start by navigating to the events page here in your browser. It should look something like this:

Open the Inspect Element Feature

Next, open the inspect element feature from your web browser in order to preview the underlying HTML associated with the page.

Write a Function to Scrape all of the Events on the Given Page

The function should return a Pandas DataFrame with columns for the Event_Name, Venue, and Number_of_Attendees.

Start by importing the relevant libraries, making a request to the relevant URL, and exploring the contents of the response with BeautifulSoup. Then fill in the scrape_events function with the relevant code.

# Relevant imports

EVENTS_PAGE_URL = "https://web.archive.org/web/20210326225933/https://ra.co/events/us/newyork?week=2019-03-30"

# Exploration: making the request and parsing the response

# Find the container with event listings in it

# Find a list of events by date within that container

# Extract the date (e.g. Sat, 30 Mar) from one of those containers

# Extract the name, venue, and number of attendees from one of the
# events within that container

# Loop over all of the event entries, extract this information
# from each, and assemble a dataframe

# Bring it all together in a function that makes the request, gets the
# list of entries from the response, loops over that list to extract the
# name, venue, date, and number of attendees for each event, and returns
# that list of events as a dataframe

def scrape_events(events_page_url):
    #Your code here
    df.columns = ["Event_Name", "Venue", "Event_Date", "Number_of_Attendees"]
    return df

# Test out your function
scrape_events(EVENTS_PAGE_URL)

Write a Function to Retrieve the URL for the Next Page

As you scroll down, there should be a button labeled "Next Week" that will take you to the next page of events. Write code to find that button and extract the URL from it.

This is a relative path, so make sure you add https://web.archive.org to the front to get the URL.

# Find the button, find the relative path, create the URL for the current `soup`

# Fill in this function, to take in the current page's URL and return the
# next page's URL
def next_page(url):
    #Your code here
    return next_page_url

# Test out your function
next_page(EVENTS_PAGE_URL)

Scrape the Next 500 Events

In other words, repeatedly call scrape_events and next_page until you have assembled a dataframe with at least 500 rows.

Display the data sorted by the number of attendees, greatest to least.

We recommend adding a brief time.sleep call between requests.get calls to avoid rate limiting.

# Your code here

Summary

Congratulations! In this lab, you successfully developed a pipeline to scrape a website for concert event information!