How to get an HTML file using Python?

Question

I am not very familiar with Python. I am trying to extract the artist names (for a start :)) from the following page: http://www.infolanka.com/miyuru_gee/art/art.html.

How do I retrieve the page? My two main concerns are; what functions to use and how to filter out useless links from the page?

Answer 1

Example using urlib and lxml.html:

import urllib
from lxml import html

url = "http://www.infolanka.com/miyuru_gee/art/art.html"
page = html.fromstring(urllib.urlopen(url).read())

for link in page.xpath("//a"):
    print "Name", link.text, "URL", link.get("href")

output >>
    [('Aathma Liyanage', 'athma.html'),
     ('Abewardhana Balasuriya', 'abewardhana.html'),
     ('Aelian Thilakeratne', 'aelian_thi.html'),
     ('Ahamed Mohideen', 'ahamed.html'),
    ]