How do you scrape flight information from airline websites?

Ivo Joris · 2024-12-18T06:55:13+00:00

Scraping flight information from airline websites can be challenging due to dynamic content and anti-scraping measures. Most airline websites use JavaScript to load flight schedules, fares, and availability, making tools like Selenium or Puppeteer necessary. To start, inspect the page using developer tools to identify the elements containing flight details. Some websites provide APIs for accessing flight data, but these often require authentication or have limitations on usage. If the data is loaded via AJAX, you can monitor network traffic to find the relevant endpoints and query them directly.Here’s an example of scraping static flight information with BeautifulSoup:import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoupurl "https://example.com/flights"headers {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"}response requests.get(url, headersheaders)if response.status_code 200: soup BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html.parser") flights soup.find_all("div", class_"flight-item") for flight in flights: route flight.find("span", class_"route").text.strip() price flight.find("span", class_"price").text.strip() print(f"Route: {route}, Price: {price}")else: print("Failed to fetch flight information.")Using browser automation tools can also simulate user interactions like selecting dates or destinations. Proxies and rate-limiting are essential to avoid being flagged by the website. How do you ensure your scraper handles unexpected changes in the site’s structure?

General Web Scraping

How do you scrape flight information from airline websites?

Posted by Ivo Joris on 12/18/2024 at 6:55 am
Scraping flight information from airline websites can be challenging due to dynamic content and anti-scraping measures. Most airline websites use JavaScript to load flight schedules, fares, and availability, making tools like Selenium or Puppeteer necessary. To start, inspect the page using developer tools to identify the elements containing flight details. Some websites provide APIs for accessing flight data, but these often require authentication or have limitations on usage. If the data is loaded via AJAX, you can monitor network traffic to find the relevant endpoints and query them directly.
Here’s an example of scraping static flight information with BeautifulSoup:
```
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "https://example.com/flights"
headers = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"}
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
if response.status_code == 200:
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html.parser")
    flights = soup.find_all("div", class_="flight-item")
    for flight in flights:
        route = flight.find("span", class_="route").text.strip()
        price = flight.find("span", class_="price").text.strip()
        print(f"Route: {route}, Price: {price}")
else:
    print("Failed to fetch flight information.")
```
Using browser automation tools can also simulate user interactions like selecting dates or destinations. Proxies and rate-limiting are essential to avoid being flagged by the website. How do you ensure your scraper handles unexpected changes in the site’s structure?
Rhea Erika replied 2 days, 6 hours ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
1 Reply

Rhea Erika

Member
12/20/2024 at 1:07 pm

To handle unexpected changes, I use dynamic XPaths instead of fixed ones. This makes the scraper more adaptable to slight layout changes without requiring constant updates.

How do you scrape flight information from airline websites?

Rhea Erika