Python: How to extract URL from HTML Page using BeautifulSoup?

Question

I have a HTML Page with multiple divs like

<div class="article-additional-info">
A peculiar situation arose in the Supreme Court on Tuesday when two lawyers claimed to be the representative of one of the six accused in the December 16 gangrape case who has sought shifting of t...
<a class="more" href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/gangrape-case-two-lawyers-claim-to-be-engaged-by-accused/article4332680.ece">
<span class="arrows">»</span>
</a>
</div>

<div class="article-additional-info">
Power consumers in the city will have to brace for spending more on their monthly bills as all three power distribution companies – the Anil Ambani-owned BRPL and BYPL and the Tatas-owned Tata Powe...
<a class="more" href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/power-discoms-demand-yet-another-hike-in-charges/article4331482.ece">
<a class="commentsCount" href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/power-discoms-demand-yet-another-hike-in-charges/article4331482.ece#comments">
</div>

and I need to get the <a href=> value for all the divs with class article-additional-info I am new to BeautifulSoup

so I need the the urls

"http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/gangrape-case-two-lawyers-claim-to-be-engaged-by-accused/article4332680.ece"
"http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/power-discoms-demand-yet-another-hike-in-charges/article4331482.ece"

What is the best way to achieve this?

Answer 1

According to your criteria, it returns three URLs (not two) - did you want to filter out the third?

Basic idea is to iterate through the HTML, pulling out only those elements in your class, and then iterating through all of the links in that class, pulling out the actual links:

In [1]: from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

In [2]: html = # your HTML

In [3]: soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

In [4]: for item in soup.find_all(attrs={'class': 'article-additional-info'}):
   ...:     for link in item.find_all('a'):
   ...:         print link.get('href')
   ...:         
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/gangrape-case-two-lawyers-claim-to-be-engaged-by-accused/article4332680.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/power-discoms-demand-yet-another-hike-in-charges/article4331482.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/power-discoms-demand-yet-another-hike-in-charges/article4331482.ece#comments

This limits your search to just those elements with the article-additional-info class tag, and inside of there looks for all anchor (a) tags and grabs their corresponding href link.

Answer 2

After working with the documentation, I did it the following way, thank you all for your answers, I appreciate them

>>> import urllib2
>>> f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/delhi/?union=citynews')
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(f.fp)
>>> for link in soup.select('.article-additional-info'):
...   print link.find('a').attrs['href']
... 
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/airport-metro-express-is-back/article4335059.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/91-more-illegal-colonies-to-be-regularised/article4335069.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/gangrape-case-two-lawyers-claim-to-be-engaged-by-accused/article4332680.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/power-discoms-demand-yet-another-hike-in-charges/article4331482.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/nurses-women-groups-demand-safety-audit-of-workplaces/article4331470.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/delhi-bpl-families-to-get-12-subsidised-lpg-cylinders/article4328990.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/shias-condemn-violence-against-religious-minorities/article4328276.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/new-archbishop-of-delhi-takes-over/article4328284.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/delhi-metro-to-construct-subway-without-disrupting-traffic/article4328290.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/Food/going-for-the-kill-in-patparganj/article4323210.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/fire-at-janpath-bhavan/article4335068.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/fiveyearold-girl-killed-as-school-van-overturns/article4335065.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/real-life-stories-of-real-women/article4331483.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/women-councillors-allege-harassment-by-male-councillors-of-rival-parties/article4331471.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/airport-metro-resumes-today/article4331467.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/hearing-today-on-plea-to-shift-trial/article4328415.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/protestors-demand-change-in-attitude-of-men-towards-women/article4328277.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/bjp-promises-5-lakh-houses-for-poor-on-interestfree-loans/article4328280.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/metroplus/papad-bidi-and-a-dacoit/article4323219.ece
http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/Food/gharana-of-food-not-just-music/article4323212.ece
>>> 

Answer 3

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS
html = # Your HTML
soup = BS(html)
for text in soup.find_all('div', class_='article-additional-info'):
    for links in text.find_all('a'):
        print links.get('href')

Which prints:

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/gangrape-case-two-lawyers-claim-to-be-engaged-by-accused/article4332680.ece    
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/power-discoms-demand-yet-another-hike-in-charges/article4331482.ece    
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/power-discoms-demand-yet-another-hike-in-charges/article4331482.ece#comments

Answer 4

In [4]: for item in soup.find_all(attrs={'class': 'article-additional-info'}):
...:     for link in item.find_all('a'):
...:         print link.get('href')
...: 
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/gangrape-case-two-lawyers-claim-to-be-engaged-by-accused/article4332680.ece    
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/power-discoms-demand-yet-another-hike-in-charges/article4331482.ece    
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/power-discoms-demand-yet-another-hike-in-charges/article4331482.ece#comments