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Interactive mode provides a user-friendly CLI menu that guides you through all scraping operations with prompts and validation.

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Launching Interactive Mode

Start the interactive runner: 
python main.py
You’ll see the welcome panel: 
┌─ main.py ──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Accra Property Scraper                             │
│ - Interactive multi-spider runner                  │
│ - Listing resume mode queues only missing URLs     │
│ - CSV writes happen item-by-item during crawl      │
│ - Jiji listings are cleaned to outputs/data/raw.csv│
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
The main menu presents four action options: 
Choose action
  1. Collect listing URLs
  2. Scrape listing details
  3. Resume listing scrape (missing URLs only)
  4. Exit
Enter choice [1]:
Press Enter to accept the default choice shown in brackets [1].

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Site Selection

For each action, you’ll be prompted to select which site(s) to scrape: 
Select source
  1. Jiji only
  2. Meqasa only
  3. Both Jiji and Meqasa
Enter choice [3]:
Choosing “Both” runs spiders for both sites sequentially in a single process.

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Action 1: Collect Listing URLs

Collects property listing URLs from search result pages.
1

Select sites

Choose Jiji, Meqasa, or both
2

Configure Jiji parameters (if selected)

Start page:
Jiji start page [1]:
URL mode:
Jiji URL mode
  1. Auto detect total pages
  2. Fixed number of pages
  3. Convert expected listings to page count
Enter choice [1]:
  • Auto detect: Spider discovers total pages automatically
  • Fixed number of pages: Specify max_pages (e.g., 5)
  • Expected listings: Specify total_listing (e.g., 200) and spider calculates pages needed
3

Configure Meqasa parameters (if selected)

Start page:
Meqasa start page [1]:
URL mode:
Meqasa URL mode
  1. Auto detect total pages
  2. Fixed number of pages
Enter choice [1]:
  • Auto detect: Spider discovers total pages automatically
  • Fixed number of pages: Specify total_pages (e.g., 5)
4

Spider runs

The selected URL spiders run and write to:
  • outputs/urls/jiji_urls.csv
  • outputs/urls/meqasa_urls.csv

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Example Terminal Session

Choose action
  1. Collect listing URLs
  2. Scrape listing details
  3. Resume listing scrape (missing URLs only)
  4. Exit
Enter choice [1]: 1

Select source
  1. Jiji only
  2. Meqasa only
  3. Both Jiji and Meqasa
Enter choice [3]: 1

Jiji start page [1]: 1

Jiji URL mode
  1. Auto detect total pages
  2. Fixed number of pages
  3. Convert expected listings to page count
Enter choice [1]: 2

Jiji max pages [5]: 10

[Spider runs...]

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Action 2: Scrape Listing Details

Scrapes full property details from collected URLs.
1

Select sites

Choose Jiji, Meqasa, or both
2

Specify URL CSV paths

For each selected site:
Jiji URL CSV [outputs/urls/jiji_urls.csv]:
Press Enter to use the default path, or enter a custom path.
3

Spider runs

The listing spiders read URLs from the CSV and write scraped data to:
  • outputs/data/jiji_data.csv
  • outputs/data/meqasa_data.csv
4

Jiji auto-cleaning (if Jiji was scraped)

After Jiji listing scrape completes, clean.py runs automatically and writes cleaned data to:
  • outputs/data/raw.csv

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Example Terminal Session

Choose action
  1. Collect listing URLs
  2. Scrape listing details
  3. Resume listing scrape (missing URLs only)
  4. Exit
Enter choice [1]: 2

Select source
  1. Jiji only
  2. Meqasa only
  3. Both Jiji and Meqasa
Enter choice [3]: 3

Jiji URL CSV [outputs/urls/jiji_urls.csv]:
Meqasa URL CSV [outputs/urls/meqasa_urls.csv]:

[Spiders run...]
[Jiji cleaning runs...]

Done.

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Action 3: Resume Listing Scrape

See the Resume Mode page for detailed documentation on this action.

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Input Validation

The interactive runner validates all inputs:
  • Integer prompts: Must be valid integers >= 1
  • Yes/No prompts: Accepts y, yes, n, no (case-insensitive)
  • Choice prompts: Accepts the number or the exact choice value
  • Path prompts: Converts relative paths to absolute paths from project root
Invalid inputs show a red error message and re-prompt until valid input is provided.

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File Paths

All file paths in interactive mode:
  • Show as relative paths from project root for readability
  • Are converted to absolute paths internally
  • Can be entered as relative (resolved from project root) or absolute
Jiji URL CSV [outputs/urls/jiji_urls.csv]: custom/path.csv
This resolves to <project_root>/custom/path.csv.

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