Using Python and BeautifulSoup (saved webpage source codes into a local file)

Question

I am using Python 2.7 + BeautifulSoup 4.3.2.

I am trying to use Python and BeautifulSoup to pick up information on a webpage. Because the webpage is in the company website and requires login and redirection, I copied the target page's source code page into a file and saved it as “example.html” in C:\ for the convenience of practicing.

This is a part of the original code:

<tr class="ghj">     <td><span class="city-sh"><sh src="./citys/1.jpg" alt="boy" title="boy" /></span><a href="./membercity.php?mode=view&amp;u=12563">port_new_cape</a></td>     <td class="position"><a href="./search.php?id=12563&amp;sr=positions" title="Search positions">452</a></td>     <td class="details"><div>South</div></td>     <td>May 09, 1997</td>     <td>Jan 23, 2009 12:05 pm&nbsp;</td> </tr> 

The code I worked out so far is:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import re import urllib2  url = "C:\example.html" page = urllib2.urlopen(url) soup = BeautifulSoup(page.read())  cities = soup.find_all('span', {'class' : 'city-sh'})  for city in cities: print city 

This is just the first stage of testing, so it's somewhat incomplete.

However, when I run it, it gives an error message. Seems it’s improper to use urllib2.urlopen to open a local file.

 Traceback (most recent call last):    File "C:\Python27\Testing.py", line 8, in <module>      page = urllib2.urlopen(url)    File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 127, in urlopen      return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)    File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 404, in open      response = self._open(req, data)    File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 427, in _open      'unknown_open', req)    File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 382, in _call_chain      result = func(*args)    File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 1247, in unknown_open      raise URLError('unknown url type: %s' % type)  URLError: <urlopen error unknown url type: c> 

How can I practice using a local file?

Answer 1

The best way to open a local file with BeautifulSoup is to pass it a file handler directly. http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/#making-the-soup

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup  with open("C:\\example.html") as fp:     soup = BeautifulSoup(fp, 'html.parser')  for city in soup.find_all('span', {'class' : 'city-sh'}):     print(city)