yanniskatsaros / who-scraped-my-car

Web scraping car listings with Python and BeautifulSoup4

Who Scraped My Car?

Let's build a web-scraper to download and parse car listings from AutoTrader to build a pricing model!

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Requirements

The project depends on requests, beautifulsoup4, and pydantic. You can install the appropriate versions using the following command:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

The project comes with a simple CLI to easily download links to URLs for car listings of a specific brand (make) in a given ZIP code. You can specify your search radius relative to your target ZIP code and limit the total number of entries to download.

To specify a car make, use one of the following "car codes" common to AutoTrader's system.

python cars/main.py

usage: main.py [-h] [--search-radius SEARCH_RADIUS] [--limit LIMIT]
               {AMC,ACURA,ALFA,ASTON,AUDI,BMW,BENTL,BUGATTI,BUICK,CAD,CHEV,CHRY,DAEW,DATSUN,DELOREAN,DODGE,EAGLE,FIAT,FER,FISK,FORD,FREIGHT,GMC,GENESIS,GEO,AMGEN,HONDA,HYUND,INFIN,ISU,JAG,JEEP,KARMA,KIA,LAM,ROV,LEXUS,LINC,LOTUS,MAZDA,MINI,MAS,MAYBACH,MCLAREN,MB,MERC,MIT,NISSAN,OLDS,PLYM,PONT,POR,RAM,RR,SRT,SAAB,SATURN,SCION,SUB,SUZUKI,TESLA,TOYOTA,VOLKS,VOLVO,YUGO,SMART}
               zip_code

Download car listings for a given car make, within a certain radius of a given
ZIP code

positional arguments:
  {AMC,ACURA,ALFA,ASTON,AUDI,BMW,BENTL,BUGATTI,BUICK,CAD,CHEV,CHRY,DAEW,DATSUN,DELOREAN,DODGE,EAGLE,FIAT,FER,FISK,FORD,FREIGHT,GMC,GENESIS,GEO,AMGEN,HONDA,HYUND,INFIN,ISU,JAG,JEEP,KARMA,KIA,LAM,ROV,LEXUS,LINC,LOTUS,MAZDA,MINI,MAS,MAYBACH,MCLAREN,MB,MERC,MIT,NISSAN,OLDS,PLYM,PONT,POR,RAM,RR,SRT,SAAB,SATURN,SCION,SUB,SUZUKI,TESLA,TOYOTA,VOLKS,VOLVO,YUGO,SMART}
                        A code representing the car make
  zip_code              ZIP code of the area to search listings for

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --search-radius SEARCH_RADIUS
                        A search radius (in miles) within the given ZIP code
  --limit LIMIT         Limit the total number of entries to search for

Examples

Download URLs for all Porsche listings within 100 miles (default) of the 77056 zip code (output truncated for brevity)

python cars/main.py POR 77056

https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=555304984
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=549029457
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=553937810
...
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=556808514
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=542778710
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=556608600

Download URLs for all Jaguar listings in the 78254 zip code for a 20 mile radius

python cars/main.py JAG 78254 --search-radius 20

https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=555182522
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=555481342
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=553690777
...
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=555481327
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=551052772
https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicledetails.xhtml?listingId=555872157

This is a work in progress so stay tuned for more updates in the future!