General Web Scraping

How to scrape project data from Kickstarter.com using Python?

Posted by Jeanne Dajana on 12/20/2024 at 8:30 am

Scraping project data from Kickstarter.com using Python allows you to collect details like project titles, goals, and funding amounts. Using requests for HTTP calls and BeautifulSoup for HTML parsing, Python provides a straightforward solution for extracting structured data. Below is an example script to scrape Kickstarter project information.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
# Target URL
url = "https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/technology"
headers = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"
}
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
if response.status_code == 200:
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html.parser")
    projects = soup.find_all("div", class_="project-card")
    for project in projects:
        title = project.find("h3").text.strip() if project.find("h3") else "Title not available"
        goal = project.find("span", class_="goal").text.strip() if project.find("span", class_="goal") else "Goal not available"
        pledged = project.find("span", class_="pledged").text.strip() if project.find("span", class_="pledged") else "Pledged amount not available"
        print(f"Title: {title}, Goal: {goal}, Pledged: {pledged}")
else:
    print("Failed to fetch Kickstarter page.")

This script extracts project titles, funding goals, and pledged amounts from Kickstarter. Pagination support allows scraping additional projects by navigating through the “Next” button. Adding random delays between requests helps avoid detection.

Kajal Aamaal replied 2 days, 6 hours ago 2 Members · 1 Reply

1 Reply

Kajal Aamaal

Member
12/20/2024 at 12:42 pm

Pagination is essential for scraping a complete dataset from Kickstarter. Projects are often distributed across multiple pages, so automating navigation through the “Next” button ensures that all data is collected. Adding random delays between requests mimics human browsing behavior. Proper pagination handling makes the scraper more effective for detailed analysis of Kickstarter trends.