[Python] How Can I Scrape Event Links and Contact Information from a Website with Python?

I am trying to scrape event links and contact information from the RaceRoster website (https://raceroster.com/search?q=5k&t=upcoming) using Python, requests, Pandas, and BeautifulSoup. The goal is to extract the Event Name, Event URL, Contact Name, and Email Address for each event and save the data into an Excel file so we can reach out to these events for business development purposes.

However, the script consistently reports that no event links are found on the search results page, despite the links being visible when inspecting the HTML in the browser. Here’s the relevant HTML for the event links from the search results page:

<a href="https://raceroster.com/events/2025/98542/13th-annual-delaware-tech-chocolate-run-5k"
target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"
class="search-results__card-event-name">
13th Annual Delaware Tech Chocolate Run 5k
</a>


Steps Taken:

1. Verified the correct selector for event links:

soup.select("a.search-results__card-event-name")

1. 
   Checked the response content from the requests.get() call using soup.prettify(). The HTML appears to lack the event links that are visible in the browser, suggesting the content may be loaded dynamically via JavaScript.
   
   
2. 
   Attempted to scrape the data using BeautifulSoup but consistently get:
   

Found 0 events on the page.
Scraped 0 events.
No contacts were scraped.


What I Need Help With:

• How can I handle this JavaScript-loaded content? Is there a way to scrape it directly, or do I need to use a tool like Selenium?
• If Selenium is required, how do I properly integrate it with BeautifulSoup for parsing the rendered HTML?

Current Script:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import pandas as pd

def scrape_event_contacts(base_url, search_url):
headers = {
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36"
}
event_contacts = []

# Fetch the main search page
print(f"Scraping page: {search_url}")
response = requests.get(search_url, headers=headers)

if response.status_code != 200:
print(f"Failed to fetch page: {search_url}, status code: {response.status_code}")
return event_contacts

soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html.parser")
# Select event links
event_links = soup.select("a.search-results__card-event-name")


print(f"Found {len(event_links)} events on the page.")

for link in event_links:
event_url = link['href']
event_name = link.text.strip() # Extract Event Name

try:
print(f"Scraping event: {event_url}")
event_response = requests.get(event_url, headers=headers)
if event_response.status_code != 200:
print(f"Failed to fetch event page: {event_url}, status code: {event_response.status_code}")
continue

event_soup = BeautifulSoup(event_response.content, "html.parser")

# Extract contact name and email
contact_name = event_soup.find("dd", class_="event-details__contact-list-definition")
email = event_soup.find("a", href=lambda href: href and "mailto:" in href)

contact_name_text = contact_name.text.strip() if contact_name else "N/A"
email_address = email['href'].split("mailto:")[1].split("?")[0] if email else "N/A"

if contact_name or email:
print(f"Found contact: {contact_name_text}, email: {email_address}")
event_contacts.append({
"Event Name": event_name,
"Event URL": event_url,
"Event Contact": contact_name_text,
"Email": email_address
})
else:
print(f"No contact information found for {event_url}")
except Exception as e:
print(f"Error scraping event {event_url}: {e}")

print(f"Scraped {len(event_contacts)} events.")
return event_contacts

def save_to_spreadsheet(data, output_file):
if not data:
print("No data to save.")
return
df = pd.DataFrame(data)
df.to_excel(output_file, index=False)
print(f"Data saved to {output_file}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
base_url = "https://raceroster.com"
search_url = "https://raceroster.com/search?q=5k&t=upcoming"
output_file = "/Users/my_name/Documents/event_contacts.xlsx"

contact_data = scrape_event_contacts(base_url, search_url)
if contact_data:
save_to_spreadsheet(contact_data, output_file)
else:
print("No contacts were scraped.")


Expected Outcome:

• Extract all event links from the search results page.
• Navigate to each event’s detail page.
• Scrape the contact name () and email () from the detail page.
• Save the results to an Excel file.

Continue reading...