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Next Page Link

The following script is called upon completion of scraping the first page of a site's details. This script is useful when matching the current page number in the HTML is preferable or simpler than matching the next page number. Depending on how a site is coded, the number of the next page may not even appear on the current page. In this case, we would match for the word "Next", to simply determine if a next page exists or not. The regular expression used for the word next would be used as follows:

~@NEXT@~

The regular expression for the lone token ~@NEXT@~ would be the text that suggests that a next page exists, such as Next Page or maybe a simple >> link.

The only change you should have to make to the code below is to set any variable names properly (if different than in your own project), and to set the correct scrapeableFile name near the bottom.

// The variable "next" is the result of attempting to match for the word "Next"
// Check to see if we found the word or phrase that flags a "Next" page
if (session.getVariable("NEXT") != null)
{
    // Retrieve the page number of the page just scraped
    currentPage = session.getVariable("PAGE");
    if (currentPage == null)
        currentPage = 1;
    else
        currentPage = Integer.parseInt(currentPage).toString();

     // write out the page number of the page just scraped
    session.log("Last page was: " + currentPage);

    // Increment the page number
    currentPage++;

    // write out the page number of the next page to be scraped
    session.log("Next page is: " + currentPage);

    // Set the "PAGE" variable with the incremented page number
    session.setVariable("PAGE", currentPage);

    // Clear the "NEXT" variable so that the next page is allowed to find it's own value for "NEXT"
    session.setVariable("NEXT", null);

    // Scrape the next page
    session.scrapeFile("Scraping Session Name--Next Page");
}

scraper on 07/16/2010 at 4:24 pm