How to scrape data from Expedia using socks5 proxy

With the development of tourism, more and more people choose to book air tickets, hotels and travel products through online travel platforms. As a world-renowned online travel platform, Expedia has a large number of travel resources and customer groups, providing users with convenient and fast booking services.

Since the Expedia website has restrictions on frequent access to the same IP address, I need to use socks5 proxy to capture data. In this article, we will share how to use socks5 proxy to crawl data from Expedia.

1. What is socks5 proxy?

socks5 proxy is a network protocol that allows users to connect to the Internet through a proxy server. Compared with other proxy protocols, socks5 has higher security and faster speed. It can hide the user's real IP address, making the user more anonymous when visiting the website.

2. Why do you need to use socks5 proxy?

In the process of crawling data, you often encounter some limitations, such as the anti-crawler mechanism of the website. These restrictions may prevent us from properly crawling data from the target website. At this time, using socks5 proxy can help us bypass these restrictions and make our crawling process smoother.

3. How to use socks5 proxy to grab data from Expedia

1. Get socks5 proxy

First, we need to obtain an available socks5 proxy. It can be purchased or obtained for free, but it is recommended to choose a paid proxy service because free proxies are often unstable and easily restricted.

2. Configure the proxy

Next, we need to configure the proxy so that our crawler can connect to the Internet through the proxy server. Here we take Python as an example, using the requests library to send requests. The code example is as follows:

import requests

# IP address and port number of proxy server

proxy = 'socks5://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxx'

# Set proxy

proxies = {

     'http': proxy,

     'https': proxy

}

# send request

response = requests.get(url, proxies=proxies)

3.Set User-Agent

In order to better avoid being recognized by the website as our crawler, we can set up a random User-Agent. The code example is as follows:

import random

# Randomly select a User-Agent

user_agent_list = [

     'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.76 Safari/537.36',

     'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_3) AppleWebKit/602.4.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0.3 Safari/602.4.8',

     'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0',

     'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36',

     'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.101 Safari/537.36',

]

user_agent = random.choice(user_agent_list)

# Set headers

headers = {

     'User-Agent': user_agent

}

# send request

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, proxies=proxies)

4. Capture data

Finally, we can grab the data we need by parsing the HTML code of the web page. Here we take grabbing the hotel name as an example. The code example is as follows:

```

#Import BeautifulSoup library

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# Parse HTML code

soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')

# Find all tags with hotel names

hotel_tags = soup.find_all('h3', class_='hotelName')

# Traverse tags and extract hotel names

for hotel in hotel_tags:

     hotel_name = hotel.text.strip()

     print(hotel_name)

```

The above is the entire process of using socks5 proxy to crawl data from Expedia.

4. Precautions

Choose a stable socks5 proxy service provider. Since the geographical location, bandwidth and stability of the socks5 proxy server will affect the efficiency and success rate of data capture, we should choose a reputable, stable and reliable service provider.

Change the proxy server regularly. In order to ensure the smooth progress of data capture, we should regularly change the socks5 proxy server. This avoids being discovered and restricted access by the Expedia website.

Avoid frequent visits. Although using socks5 proxy can avoid being restricted by the Expedia website, frequent visits will still cause the website to be alert. Therefore, we should arrange crawling tasks reasonably to avoid excessive access.

5. Summary

Using socks5 proxy can help us capture Expedia website data, thereby providing data support for the development of the tourism industry. 

When using socks5 proxy, we should choose a stable and reliable service provider, change the proxy server regularly, and avoid frequent visits. I believe that with the advancement of technology, socks5 proxy will play a more important role in the field of data capture.