Python 3 code to extract business listings from Yelp.com

yelp_search.py

from lxml import html
import unicodecsv as csv
import requests
from time import sleep
import re
import argparse
import json


def parse(url):
    headers = {'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36'}
    success = False
    
    for _ in range(10):
        response = requests.get(url, verify=False, headers=headers)
        if response.status_code == 200:
            success = True
            break
        else:
            print("Response received: %s. Retrying : %s"%(response.status_code, url))
            success = False
    
    if success == False:
        print("Failed to process the URL: ", url)
    
    parser = html.fromstring(response.text)
    listing = parser.xpath("//li[@class='regular-search-result']")
    raw_json = parser.xpath("//script[contains(@data-hypernova-key,'yelp_main__SearchApp')]//text()")
    scraped_datas = []
    
    # Case 1: Getting data from new UI
    if raw_json:
        print('Grabbing data from new UI')
        cleaned_json = raw_json[0].replace('<!--', '').replace('-->', '').strip()
        json_loaded = json.loads(cleaned_json)
        search_results = json_loaded['searchPageProps']['searchResultsProps']['searchResults']
        
        for results in search_results:
            # Ad pages doesn't have this key.  
            result = results.get('searchResultBusiness')
            if result:
                is_ad = result.get('isAd')
                price_range = result.get('priceRange')
                position = result.get('ranking')
                name = result.get('name')
                ratings = result.get('rating')
                reviews = result.get('reviewCount')
                address = result.get('formattedAddress')
                neighborhood = result.get('neighborhoods')
                category_list = result.get('categories')
                full_address = address+' '+''.join(neighborhood)
                url = "https://www.yelp.com"+result.get('businessUrl')
                
                category = []
                for categories in category_list:
                    category.append(categories['title'])
                business_category = ','.join(category)

                # Filtering out ads
                if not(is_ad):
                    data = {
                        'business_name': name,
                        'rank': position,
                        'review_count': reviews,
                        'categories': business_category,
                        'rating': ratings,
                        'address': full_address,
                        'price_range': price_range,
                        'url': url
                    }
                    scraped_datas.append(data)
        return scraped_datas

    # Case 2: Getting data from OLD UI
    if listing:
        print('Grabbing data from OLD UI')

        for results in listing:    
            raw_position = results.xpath(".//span[@class='indexed-biz-name']/text()")
            raw_name = results.xpath(".//span[@class='indexed-biz-name']/a//text()")
            raw_ratings = results.xpath(".//div[contains(@class,'rating-large')]//@title")
            raw_review_count = results.xpath(".//span[contains(@class,'review-count')]//text()")
            raw_price_range = results.xpath(".//span[contains(@class,'price-range')]//text()")
            category_list = results.xpath(".//span[contains(@class,'category-str-list')]//a//text()")
            raw_address = results.xpath(".//address//text()")
            is_reservation_available = results.xpath(".//span[contains(@class,'reservation')]")
            is_accept_pickup = results.xpath(".//span[contains(@class,'order')]")
            url = "https://www.yelp.com"+results.xpath(".//span[@class='indexed-biz-name']/a/@href")[0]

            name = ''.join(raw_name).strip()
            position = ''.join(raw_position).replace('.', '').strip()
            cleaned_reviews = ''.join(raw_review_count).strip()
            reviews =  re.sub("\D+", "", cleaned_reviews)
            categories = ','.join(category_list)
            cleaned_ratings = ''.join(raw_ratings).strip()
            if raw_ratings:
                ratings = re.findall("\d+[.,]?\d+", cleaned_ratings)[0]
            else:
                ratings = 0
            price_range = len(''.join(raw_price_range)) if raw_price_range else 0
            address  = ' '.join(' '.join(raw_address).split())
            reservation_available = True if is_reservation_available else False
            accept_pickup = True if is_accept_pickup else False
            data = {
                    'business_name': name,
                    'rank': position,
                    'review_count': reviews,
                    'categories': categories,
                    'rating': ratings,
                    'address': address,                    
                    'price_range': price_range,
                    'url': url
            }
            scraped_datas.append(data)
        return scraped_datas

if __name__ == "__main__":
    argparser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    argparser.add_argument('place', help='Location/ Address/ zip code')
    search_query_help = """Available search queries are:\n
                            Restaurants,\n
                            Breakfast & Brunch,\n
                            Coffee & Tea,\n
                            Delivery,
                            Reservations"""
    argparser.add_argument('search_query', help=search_query_help)
    args = argparser.parse_args()
    place = args.place
    search_query = args.search_query
    yelp_url = "https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=%s&find_loc=%s" % (search_query,place)
    print ("Retrieving :", yelp_url)
    scraped_data = parse(yelp_url)
    with open("scraped_yelp_results_for_%s.csv" % (place), "wb") as fp:
        fieldnames = ['rank', 'business_name', 'review_count', 'categories', 'rating', 'address', 'price_range', 'url']
        writer = csv.DictWriter(fp, fieldnames=fieldnames, quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)
        writer.writeheader()
        if scraped_data:
            print ("Writing data to output file")  
            for data in scraped_data:
                writer.writerow(data)

Hi Scrapehero,
I used parts of your work for a script that I needed. Thanks for getting me started. !

mayank

Hi Scrapehero,
Are you not blocked from Yelp?

I used NodeJS to scrap Yelp, but after I scrap 5~7 times, I am get blocked.
If I change my IP with VPN, it works again but after several times, again get blacked.

Hope some advice from you.
Thanks,

This doesnt work !!
My csv stays blank ,The error I think is at line no 27 and 28, both listings and raw json show blank !
Please help

@shreyu2403 yelp changed the structure of their website.
I've made one yelp scraper.
You can check that yelp scraper