Python Parsing HTML Table Generated by JavaScript

Question

I'm trying to scrape a table from the NYSE website (http://www1.nyse.com/about/listed/IPO_Index.html) into a pandas dataframe. In order to do so, I have a setup like this:

def htmltodf(url):
page = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.text)

tables = soup.findAll('table')
test = pandas.io.html.read_html(str(tables))

return(test)            #return dataframe type object

However, when I run this on the page, all of the table returned in the list are essentially empty. When I further investigated, I found that the table is generated by javascript. When using the developer tools in my web browser, I see that the table looks like any other HTML table with the tags, etc. However, a view of the source code revealed something like this instead:

<script language="JavaScript">

.
.
.

<script>
var year = [["ICC","21st Century Oncology Holdings, Inc.","22 May  2014","/about/listed/icc.html" ],
... more entries here ...
,["ZOES","Zoe's Kitchen, Inc.","11 Apr 2014","/about/listed/zoes.html" ]] ;

    if(year.length != 0) 
    {   

    document.write ("<table width='619' border='0' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='0'><tr><td><span class='fontbold'>");
    document.write ('2014' + " IPO Showcase"); 
    document.write ("</span></td></tr></table>"); 
    }  
</script>

Therefore, when my HTML parser goes to look for the table tag, all it can find is the if condition, and no proper tags below that would indicate content. How can I scrape this table? Is there a tag that I can search for instead of table that will reveal the content? Because the code is not in traditional html table form, how do I read it in with pandas--do I have to manually parse the data?

Answer 1

In this case, you need something to run that javascript code for you.

One option here would be to use selenium:

from pandas.io.html import read_html
from selenium import webdriver


driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get('http://www1.nyse.com/about/listed/IPO_Index.html')

table = driver.find_element_by_xpath('//div[@class="sp5"]/table//table/..')
table_html = table.get_attribute('innerHTML')

df = read_html(table_html)[0]
print df

driver.close()

prints:

                                                    0        1          2   3
0                                                Name   Symbol        NaT NaN
1                       Performance Sports Group Ltd.      PSG 2014-06-20 NaN
2                           Century Communities, Inc.      CCS 2014-06-18 NaN
3                        Foresight Energy Partners LP     FELP 2014-06-18 NaN
...
79  EGShares TCW EM Long Term Investment Grade Bon...     LEMF 2014-01-08 NaN
80  EGShares TCW EM Short Term Investment Grade Bo...     SEMF 2014-01-08 NaN

[81 rows x 4 columns]