How to scrape Yelp without using Selenium or any browser automation?

Scraping Yelp without using browser automation tools like Selenium can be done by making HTTP requests directly to the Yelp website and then parsing the HTML content. However, please note that web scraping can violate Yelp's Terms of Service. Make sure you review and adhere to Yelp's API Terms of Service and robots.txt file before scraping their site.

Here's a general outline of steps you might take to scrape Yelp using Python with the requests library and BeautifulSoup for parsing HTML:

1. Install necessary Python libraries if you haven't already:

   pip install requests beautifulsoup4
   

2. Import the libraries in your Python script:

   import requests
   from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
   

3. Make an HTTP GET request to the page you want to scrape:

   headers = {
       'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:85.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/85.0'
   }
   
   url = 'https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Restaurants&find_loc=San+Francisco%2C+CA'
   response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
   

   Note: Always use a proper User-Agent to simulate a real browser request.

4. Parse the HTML content using BeautifulSoup:

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

5. Extract the data you're interested in:

   # Example: Extract names of the businesses
   for business in soup.find_all('div', class_='businessName__09f24__3Wql2'):
       name = business.find('a').text
       print(name)
   

   Note: The class names used in the example above may change over time as Yelp updates their site. You will need to inspect the HTML structure and update the class or tag selectors accordingly.

This is a basic example and might not work if Yelp uses techniques to prevent scraping, like dynamic content loading with JavaScript, or if they have bot detection mechanisms in place.

For a more robust solution, you might consider using Yelp's official API, which provides a legal and structured way to access their data. The API has limitations on the number of requests you can make and the type of data you can access, but it's a safer and more reliable method than scraping.

Here is a brief example of how to use Yelp's API with Python:

1. Sign up for Yelp's API to get an API key.

2. Install the requests library if you haven't already.

3. Make an API request using your API key:

   import requests
   
   api_key = 'your_api_key'
   headers = {
       'Authorization': f'Bearer {api_key}',
   }
   
   url = 'https://api.yelp.com/v3/businesses/search'
   params = {
       'term': 'Restaurants',
       'location': 'San Francisco, CA',
   }
   
   response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, params=params)
   businesses = response.json().get('businesses', [])
   
   for business in businesses:
       name = business['name']
       print(name)
   

Always remember that scraping can be a legally gray area, so it is crucial to follow Yelp's Terms of Service and respect their data usage policies. When in doubt, use the API.