How to Scrape Free Chapters from Qidian Novels Using Python
This tutorial walks through analyzing a Qidian novel page, extracting GET request parameters, constructing the catalog URL, and repeatedly fetching free chapters with Python, handling asynchronous loading and delays to reliably download the novel’s free content.
Python Web Scraping Example: Downloading Qidian Novels
Before starting the case, we analyze the target page.
1. Interface analysis
By inspecting the page we locate the GET request parameters that return the novel title and link.
After obtaining the data we randomly select a novel; here we choose the first one.
Opening its chapter list reveals free and paid sections; we only scrape the free chapters.
We then examine the URL structure to construct the catalog URL.
The URL consists of the base, the novel ID (e.g., 1014243481), and the #Catalog fragment.
Combining these gives the full catalog link: https://book.qidian.com/info/1014243481#Catalog We send a GET request to this catalog page. Because the content loads asynchronously, we need to repeat requests with a delay to retrieve all chapters.
The result contains all free chapters of the novel. Although the data is not as clean as an official API, it is sufficient for our purpose.
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