Court Scraper Analysis

The ParserAppealsAL scraper is different from the news scrapers. This is because of the courts' use of JavaScript, which renders content dynamically.

1. Dynamic JavaScript-Rendered Content

• The site loads content dynamically, which means BeautifulSoup alone won't work
• You'll need Selenium or Playwright to render JavaScript before parsing

2. Complex URL-Based Pagination

• Pagination uses URL parameters (page~(number~0) becomes page~(number~1))
• Total pages/elements are embedded in the URL (totalElements~317~totalPages~13)
• This is very different from the simple /page/2 pattern in the news scrapers

3. Structured Table Data

• We needed 6 specific columns: Court, Case Number, Case Title, Classification, Filed Date, Open/Closed
• Case Numbers contained links we wanted to preserve (both text and href)
• We wanted all paginated results combined into one table

4. Custom URL Encoding

• The URLs use a unique encoding scheme with ~ and %2a2f (for slashes)
• Search parameters are complex with date ranges and multiple filters

Key Challenges:

• Need to handle JavaScript rendering
• Must parse and manipulate the encoded URL format for pagination
• Need to extract both text and href attributes from case number links
• Different data structure (tabular vs. article paragraphs)