Scraping Craigslist Listings with Ruby

This article explains how to scrape Craigslist apartment listings using Ruby and the Nokogiri gem. We'll go through each line of code.

First install Nokogiri:

gem install nokogiri

And require it in your script:

require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

Nokogiri allows us to parse HTML and XML in Ruby.

We'll scrape the Craigslist SF apartment listings:

url = '<https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa>'

Use open-uri to fetch the page content:

page = open(url)

Parse the HTML with Nokogiri:

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(page)

If you check the source code of Craigslist listings you can see that the listings area code looks something like this…

You can see the code block that generates the listing…

<li class="cl-static-search-result" title="Situated in Sunnyvale!, Recycling Center, 1/BD">
            <a href="https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/apa/d/santa-clara-situated-in-sunnyvale/7666802370.html">
                <div class="title">Situated in Sunnyvale!, Recycling Center, 1/BD</div>

                <div class="details">
                    <div class="price">$2,150</div>
                    <div class="location">
                        sunnyvale
                    </div>
                </div>
            </a>
        </li>

its encapsulated in the cl-static-search-result class. We also need to get the title class div and the price and location class divs to get all the data

Find all listings:

listings = doc.css('li.cl-static-search-result')

Loop through listings to extract info:

listings.each do |listing|

  title = listing.at_css('.title').text

  price = listing.at_css('.price').text

  location = listing.at_css('.location').text

  link = listing.at_css('a')['href']

  puts "#{title} #{price} #{location} #{link}"

end

The full Ruby code is:

require 'nokogiri'
require 'open-uri'

url = '<https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa>'

page = open(url)

doc = Nokogiri::HTML(page)

listings = doc.css('li.cl-static-search-result')

listings.each do |listing|

  title = listing.at_css('.title').text

  price = listing.at_css('.price').text

  location = listing.at_css('.location').text

  link = listing.at_css('a')['href']

  puts "#{title} #{price} #{location} #{link}"

end

This walks through the Ruby code to scrape Craigslist listings.

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