How to scrape image URLs from Zillow's HTML and import them into Google Sheets

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1

Hey everyone! I’m working on a project where I need to grab the first 7 image URLs from Zillow’s property listings. I’ve got the HTML, but I’m not sure how to extract just the image links. Here’s what the URLs look like:

https://propertyimages.examplesite.com/abc123-home-front-view.jpg
https://propertyimages.examplesite.com/def456-kitchen-modern.jpg
https://propertyimages.examplesite.com/ghi789-bedroom-spacious.jpg

I want to put these URLs into Google Sheets. Can anyone help me figure out a good way to do this? Maybe using regex or some other method? Thanks in advance for any tips or tricks you can share!

2

yo, have u tried using Python with BeautifulSoup? its pretty dope for scraping html. u can grab those image urls easy peasy. just parse the html, find the right tags, and boom - u got ur list of urls. then use the google sheets api to dump em in. works like a charm!

3

As someone who’s worked extensively with web scraping, I can tell you that extracting image URLs from Zillow can be tricky but definitely doable. I’ve found that using Python with the requests library to fetch the HTML and then lxml for parsing works wonders. The key is to inspect the page source and identify the specific HTML elements or attributes that contain the image URLs.

For getting those URLs into Google Sheets, I’ve had great success using the gspread library. It’s a breeze to set up and lets you interact with Google Sheets programmatically. You’ll need to set up OAuth2 credentials, but once that’s done, you can easily dump your scraped data into a sheet.

Just remember to be mindful of Zillow’s robots.txt file and implement proper rate limiting to avoid getting your IP blocked. And if you’re doing this at scale, consider using a proxy rotation service to distribute your requests. Happy scraping!

4

Have you considered using Google Apps Script for this task? It’s a powerful tool that integrates seamlessly with Google Sheets. You can write a simple script to fetch the HTML content, use regex to extract the image URLs, and then populate your sheet with the results. Here’s a basic approach:

  1. Use UrlFetchApp.fetch() to get the HTML content
  2. Apply a regex pattern like /https://propertyimages.examplesite.com/[\w-]+.jpg/g to find the URLs
  3. Use sheet.getRange() and setValues() to insert the extracted URLs into your sheet

This method doesn’t require any external libraries or complex setups. Plus, you can easily schedule it to run automatically if needed. Just remember to respect Zillow’s robots.txt and terms of service when scraping their site.