Repetitive process to follow links in a website (BeautifulSoup)

Question

I'm writing a code in Python to get all the 'a' tags in a URL using Beautiful soup, then I use the link at position 3, then I should follow that link, I will repeat this process about 18 times. I included the code below, which has the process repeated twice. I can't come about a way to repeat the same process 18 times in a loop.Any help would be appreciated.

import re
import urllib

from BeautifulSoup import *
htm1= urllib.urlopen('https://pr4e.dr-chuck.com/tsugi/mod/python-data/data/known_by_Fikret.html ').read()
soup =BeautifulSoup(htm1)
tags = soup('a')
list1=list()
for tag in tags:
    x = tag.get('href', None)
    list1.append(x)

M= list1[2]

htm2= urllib.urlopen(M).read()
soup =BeautifulSoup(htm2)
tags1 = soup('a')
list2=list()
for tag1 in tags1:
    x2 = tag1.get('href', None)
    list2.append(x2)

y= list2[2]
print y

OK, I just wrote this code, it's working but I get the same 4 links in the results. It looks like there is something wrong in the loop (please note: I'm trying the loop 4 times)

import re
import urllib
from BeautifulSoup import *
list1=list()
url = 'https://pr4e.dr-chuck.com/tsugi/mod/python-data/data/known_by_Fikret.html'

for i in range (4):  # repeat 4 times
    htm2= urllib.urlopen(url).read()
    soup1=BeautifulSoup(htm2)
    tags1= soup1('a')
    for tag1 in tags1:
        x2 = tag1.get('href', None)
        list1.append(x2)
    y= list1[2]
    if len(x2) < 3:  # no 3rd link
        break  # exit the loop
    else:
        url=y             
    print y

Answer 1

I can't come about a way to repeat the same process 18 times in a loop.

To repeat something 18 times in Python, you could use for _ in range(18) loop:

#!/usr/bin/env python2
from urllib2 import urlopen
from urlparse import urljoin
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup # $ pip install beautifulsoup4

url = 'http://example.com'
for _ in range(18):  # repeat 18 times
    soup = BeautifulSoup(urlopen(url))
    a = soup.find_all('a', href=True)  # all <a href> links
    if len(a) < 3:  # no 3rd link
        break  # exit the loop
    url = urljoin(url, a[2]['href'])  # 3rd link, note: ignore <base href>