BeautifulSoup: Get the contents of a specific table

Question

My local airport disgracefully blocks users without IE, and looks awful. I want to write a Python scripts that would get the contents of the Arrival and Departures pages every few minutes, and show them in a more readable manner.

My tools of choice are mechanize for cheating the site to believe I use IE, and BeautifulSoup for parsing page to get the flights data table.

Quite honestly, I got lost in the BeautifulSoup documentation, and can't understand how to get the table (whose title I know) from the entire document, and how to get a list of rows from that table.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

This is not the specific code you need, just a demo of how to work with BeautifulSoup. It finds the table who's id is "Table1" and gets all of its tr elements.

html = urllib2.urlopen(url).read() bs = BeautifulSoup(html) table = bs.find(lambda tag: tag.name=='table' and tag.has_attr('id') and tag['id']=="Table1")  rows = table.findAll(lambda tag: tag.name=='tr') 

Answer 2

soup = BeautifulSoup(HTML)  # the first argument to find tells it what tag to search for # the second you can pass a dict of attr->value pairs to filter # results that match the first tag table = soup.find( "table", {"title":"TheTitle"} )  rows=list() for row in table.findAll("tr"):    rows.append(row)  # now rows contains each tr in the table (as a BeautifulSoup object) # and you can search them to pull out the times