How to Scrape Meituan Takeout App Reviews Using AJAX and JavaScript

Introduction

A friend needed Meituan Takeout app review data for a summer project; instead of simply grabbing the page source, we discovered the data is loaded asynchronously via JavaScript, requiring AJAX request analysis similar to previous web‑scraping cases.

Process

Target site analysis: open the Meituan Takeout app comments page in a browser and open the developer tools (F12).

Identify the AJAX request that returns the comments. Enable "Preserve log" and click "Load more comments"; a new request appears with changing start and count parameters, where start increments by 10.

Analyze the request URL pattern: http://comment.mobilem.360.cn/comment/getComments?baike=%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%A2%E5%A4%96%E5%8D%96+Android_com.sankuai.meituan.takeoutnew&c=message&a=getmessage&start=0&count=10&_=... . By replacing the start value with i*10 , each iteration fetches the next ten comments.

Extract the desired fields from the JSON response using regular expressions.

Loop through the pages, fetch data in batches, and save the results to text files or a database.

Code

Resulting Data View

Conclusion

Program errors are normal; troubleshoot yourself before asking others.

Strengthen knowledge of data type handling.

Thanks to contributors for their help.