How should I build the pagination inside a loop item?

Pagination is a technique widely used in web design that divides content into several pages, presenting large data sets in a much easier way for internet users to digest. There are many pagination methods employed by different web developers, such as numbered pagination, infinite scrolling, etc. Although pagination is generally believed to improve user experience, the bad news is that it complicates web scraping. If you are trying to scrape data from a website and face a dilemma on how to approach pagination for web scraping, we've got you covered. Octoparse, an automatic web scraping tool, supports handling websites with various pagination structures. Now we will illustrate the different approaches on how to deal with different types of pagination with Octoparse, which includes: 1. Pagination with next button Clicking the "Next" button to paginate is perhaps one of the most used methods for pagination, making it easier for visitors to navigate through the website pages. It is very straightforward to handle this type of pagination for web scraping in Octoparse. It doesn't matter if it's a next button displayed in the form of the word - "Next" or simply a right arrow - ">", you just need to create a "pagination loop" to continue clicking on the button page after scraping the current object. (See an example here) 2. Page number without "Next" button The approach for this particular type of pagination is very similar to the next button. You want to create a pagination cycle to keep clicking on the next page number in line. However, since you won't be clicking on a static element, accurately locating the next page number is crucial. Octoparse uses XPath (XML Path Language, which uses "path like" syntax to identify and navigate nodes in an XML document) to locate any element. So, the key point here is to modify the XPath of the "pagination loop" to ensure it will always locate the next page number as soon as the current page has been completely removed (see this tutorial to learn how to modify the XPath to accurately locate the next page number). 3. Infinite scrolling Octoparse handles infinite scrolling by mimicking the scrolling behavior. Depending on the amount of content you want to load, simply set the appropriate scrolling time and form, the page will scroll automatically (see an example here). 4. "Load More" Button Load more navigation buttons are another popular alternative to infinite scrolling. In this case, you would have a specific button, like "Load More," to trigger content loading with AJAX when you reach the end of the page. Octoparse deals with the "Load More" button with a pagination cycle, which is the same as we handle the "Next" button, clicking a single button repeatedly. However, the difference is that with the "Load More" button, we must run the pagination cycle until the load button disappears before proceeding to the next step. After loading all the desired content, the scraping process is as easy as scraping a single page (check more details here). Conclusion Pagination reduces page complexity and improves the readability of web content, yet it needs to be tackled using various approaches, whichever that creates maximum efficiency. If we fail to deal with pagination properly, it will result in missing data and a waste of time. Making good use of a web scraping tool like Octoparse, you can avoid the complexities of web scraping!