ToDoCanada Events & Attractions Scraper

Scrape ToDoCanada.ca — Canada's events and attractions site. Browse events by city (Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, …) or category (adults-only, drive-thru, exhibitions, family, nightlife, food & drink, …), run site search, fetch single event pages, or read attractions / things-to-do articles. Event detail pages carry structured JSON-LD Event data (start/end dates, venue, address, image, ticket link).

What this actor does

• Five modes: byCity (default), byCategory, search, byEventUrl, attractions
• 12 cities as a dropdown: all (whole country), toronto, vancouver, calgary, edmonton, ottawa, winnipeg, banff, jasper, regina, saskatoon, central-alberta
• 12 event categories as a dropdown: adults-only, drive-thru-events, exhibitions, familyevents, festival-events, food-drink-events, free-events, fundraising-gala-events, miscellaneous, nightlife, online, sports-2
• Time-window filter (etype): upcoming / this week / this weekend / current / this month / next month / past
• Filters: event date range (client-side on JSON-LD dates), title/description keyword
• Auto-escalation: curl_cffi (chrome131 impersonation) first; lazy-engages Apify AUTO datacenter proxy + backoff on 403/429/5xx
• Empty fields are omitted; every record carries sourceUrl, scrapedAt, recordType

Output per event

• eventId, title, description
• startDate, endDate (ISO, from JSON-LD)
• venueName, addressStreet, addressLocality, addressRegion, addressPostalCode, addressCountry
• imageUrl, ticketUrl, price (when the site publishes a number)
• eventUrl, city, category (mode-scoped)
• recordType: "event" | "attraction" | "error", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	byCity	byCity / byCategory / search / byEventUrl / attractions
city	select	toronto	City slug (12 options, incl. all for whole country)
category	select	exhibitions	Event category slug (12 options)
searchQuery	string	toronto festival	Site search query (mode=search)
eventUrls	array	–	Event page URLs (mode=byEventUrl)
etype	select	upcoming	Listing time window
dateFrom / dateTo	string	–	Client-side date range filter (ISO)
containsKeyword	string	–	Title/description substring filter
maxItems	int	20	Hard cap (1–1000)

Example: upcoming exhibitions in Vancouver

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "city": "vancouver",
  "category": "exhibitions",
  "etype": "upcoming",
  "maxItems": 30
}

Example: a single event

{
  "mode": "byEventUrl",
  "eventUrls": ["https://www.todocanada.ca/city/toronto/event/bd-beats-2026/"]
}

Anti-bot notes

Plain curl gets 403 (UA-sensitive); curl_cffi with chrome131 impersonation returns 200 with full content (verified locally). If the cloud run is blocked, the actor lazy-engages the free Apify AUTO datacenter proxy and retries with exponential backoff.

Data source

HTML/JSON-LD from todocanada.ca (WordPress). Event pages embed schema.org/Event JSON-LD. Listing pages paginate at /city/{slug}/events/page/N/. No login required.

Limitations

• Event dates come from the site's JSON-LD, which uses both ISO and MM/DD/YYYY formats (both are normalized to ISO); some listings lack start/end dates (omitted, never sentinel).
• search mode returns event records only. The site search also matches roundup articles (e.g. festival, weekend); when a query's results are articles only, the run emits 0 records with a status message — use byCity/byCategory or attractions for article content.
• The site's JSON-LD emits addressCountry: "AF" as a country-code default on Canadian events (source-data defect) — this value is omitted instead of shipped.
• Attraction image URLs come from og:image; site-logo/icon URLs are rejected. Some articles have no real image (omitted).
• Image URLs are WordPress CDN paths from the site's JSON-LD — served with 200 image/jpeg from a clean shell (site is UA-sensitive; the browser UA returns 200, no Referer needed).
• Invalid inputs produce typed recordType: "error" records (no silent drops); duplicate/aliased event URLs in byEventUrl are normalized and deduped to single records.