BeautifulSoup responses with error

Question

I am trying to get my feet wet with BS. I tried to work my way through the documentation butat the very first step I encountered already a problem.

This is my code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup('https://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&api_key=5....1b&per_page=250&accuracy=1&has_geo=1&extras=geo,tags,views,description')

print(soup.prettify())

This is the response I get:

Warning (from warnings module):
File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.3/lib/python3.3/site-packages/bs4/__init__.py", line 189
'"%s" looks like a URL. Beautiful Soup is not an HTTP client. You should probably use an     
HTTP client to get the document behind the URL, and feed that document to Beautiful Soup.' % markup)
UserWarning: "https://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&api_key=5...b&per_page=250&accuracy=1&has_geo=1&extras=geo,tags,views,description" 
looks like a URL. Beautiful Soup is not an HTTP client. You should 
probably use an HTTP client to get the document behind the URL, and feed that document    
to Beautiful Soup.
https://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&api;_key=5...b&per;_page=250&accuracy;=1&has;_geo=1&extras;=geo,tags,views,description

Is it because I try to call http**s** or is it another problem? Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

You are passing URL as a string. Instead you need to get the page source via urllib2 or requests:

from urllib2 import urlopen  # for Python 3: from urllib.request import urlopen
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

URL = 'https://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&api_key=5....1b&per_page=250&accuracy=1&has_geo=1&extras=geo,tags,views,description'
soup = BeautifulSoup(urlopen(URL))

Note that you don't need to call read() on the result of urlopen(), BeautifulSoup allows the first argument to be a file-like object, urlopen() returns a file-like object.