Sandbox · pagination
Seven kinds of Next button, to practise on.
Most scrapers stop at page one because they look for a link that says “Next”. Real sites say it with an arrow, a page number, “Older posts”, another language, a class name, or a button with no address at all. Here is the same list of thirty products paged each of those ways, so you can see which ones your tool follows.
The seven
Each list is 30 items over three pages of ten. Start on the first page and crawl; anything short of 30 means the Next was missed.
An arrow with no word
The Next control is an icon: a chevron in a circle with an aria-label and no visible text. Tests whether your scraper reads labels, not just link text.
Expected: 30 products across 3 pages.
Page numbers only
A row of page numbers with the current one marked, and no Next or arrow at all. Tests whether your scraper can work out which number comes next.
Expected: 30 products across 3 pages.
A blog’s “Older posts”
A journal of posts, newest first, paged by Older posts → and ← Newer posts. Tests whether “next” is understood as “older” here.
Expected: 30 posts across 3 pages.
Next in German
The same list in German: Weiter › and ‹ Zurück, prices written 39,00 €. Tests a scraper that only knows English.
Expected: 30 products across 3 pages.
Next in Japanese
The same list in Japanese, paged by 次へ and 前へ, with prices in yen. Tests a scraper that only knows the Latin alphabet.
Expected: 30 products across 3 pages.
A class name and nothing else
An empty, styled button whose only clue is class="pagination__next" — no text, no label, the arrow drawn in CSS. Tests whether your scraper reads the markup’s own names.
Expected: 30 products across 3 pages.
A button, and no address
One page. Next page is a <button> that swaps the products in with JavaScript; the address never changes. Tests whether your scraper can click as well as follow links.
Expected: 30 products from 3 clicks.
And the ones the rest of the sandbox covers
A plain Next button over six pages, infinite scroll, a Load more button and a 2,000-row list over 40 pages. Magic Scraper follows all of them, and every one above, from the Crawl tab’s Start crawling; when it can’t tell which control is Next, point at it once and it uses that for the rest.