Using urllib2 with BeautifulSoup in Python

In yesterday’s post, I gave an intro to BeautifulSoup.

Since BeautifulSoup is not getting the web page for you, you will have to use the urllib2 module to do that.

• Python Beautiful Soup Example: Yahoo Finance Scraper
• HTML Parser: How to scrape HTML content | Parsing HTML in Python with BeautifulSoup
• How to Merge Lists in Python

BeautifulSoup Example

Please see the comments in the code to see what it does

#import the library used to query a website
import urllib2

#specify the url you want to query
url = "http://www.python.org"

#Query the website and return the html to the variable 'page'
page = urllib2.urlopen(url)

#import the Beautiful soup functions to parse the data returned from the website
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

#Parse the html in the 'page' variable, and store it in Beautiful Soup format
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)

#to print the soup.head is the head tag and soup.head.title is the title tag
print soup.head
print soup.head.title

#to print the length of the page, use the len function
print len(page)

#create a new variable to store the data you want to find.
tags = soup.findAll('a')

#to print all the links
print tags

#to get all titles and print the contents of each title
titles = soup.findAll('span', attrs = { 'class' : 'titletext' })
for title in allTitles:
    print title.contents

In upcoming posts, I will write more about this awesome module.