Web scraping with Python [closed]

Question

Use urllib2 in combination with the brilliant BeautifulSoup library:

import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
# or if you're using BeautifulSoup4:
# from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen('http://example.com').read())

for row in soup('table', {'class': 'spad'})[0].tbody('tr'):
    tds = row('td')
    print tds[0].string, tds[1].string
    # will print date and sunrise

I'd really recommend Scrapy.

Quote from a deleted answer:

• Scrapy crawling is fastest than mechanize because uses asynchronous operations (on top of Twisted).
• Scrapy has better and fastest support for parsing (x)html on top of libxml2.
• Scrapy is a mature framework with full unicode, handles redirections, gzipped responses, odd encodings, integrated http cache, etc.
• Once you are into Scrapy, you can write a spider in less than 5 minutes that download images, creates thumbnails and export the extracted data directly to csv or json.

I collected together scripts from my web scraping work into this bit-bucket library.

Example script for your case:

from webscraping import download, xpath
D = download.Download()

html = D.get('http://example.com')
for row in xpath.search(html, '//table[@class="spad"]/tbody/tr'):
    cols = xpath.search(row, '/td')
    print 'Sunrise: %s, Sunset: %s' % (cols[1], cols[2])

Output:

Sunrise: 08:39, Sunset: 16:08
Sunrise: 08:39, Sunset: 16:09
Sunrise: 08:39, Sunset: 16:10
Sunrise: 08:40, Sunset: 16:10
Sunrise: 08:40, Sunset: 16:11
Sunrise: 08:40, Sunset: 16:12
Sunrise: 08:40, Sunset: 16:13

I would strongly suggest checking out pyquery. It uses jquery-like (aka css-like) syntax which makes things really easy for those coming from that background.

For your case, it would be something like:

from pyquery import *

html = PyQuery(url='http://www.example.com/')
trs = html('table.spad tbody tr')

for tr in trs:
  tds = tr.getchildren()
  print tds[1].text, tds[2].text

Output:

5:16 AM 9:28 PM
5:15 AM 9:30 PM
5:13 AM 9:31 PM
5:12 AM 9:33 PM
5:11 AM 9:34 PM
5:10 AM 9:35 PM
5:09 AM 9:37 PM

You can use urllib2 to make the HTTP requests, and then you'll have web content.

You can get it like this:

import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen('http://example.com')
html = response.read()

Beautiful Soup is a python HTML parser that is supposed to be good for screen scraping.

In particular, here is their tutorial on parsing an HTML document.

Good luck!

I use a combination of Scrapemark (finding urls - py2) and httlib2 (downloading images - py2+3). The scrapemark.py has 500 lines of code, but uses regular expressions, so it may be not so fast, did not test.

Example for scraping your website:

import sys
from pprint import pprint
from scrapemark import scrape

pprint(scrape("""
    <table class="spad">
        <tbody>
            {*
                <tr>
                    <td>{{[].day}}</td>
                    <td>{{[].sunrise}}</td>
                    <td>{{[].sunset}}</td>
                    {# ... #}
                </tr>
            *}
        </tbody>
    </table>
""", url=sys.argv[1] ))

Usage:

python2 sunscraper.py http://www.example.com/

Result:

[{'day': u'1. Dez 2012', 'sunrise': u'08:18', 'sunset': u'16:10'},
 {'day': u'2. Dez 2012', 'sunrise': u'08:19', 'sunset': u'16:10'},
 {'day': u'3. Dez 2012', 'sunrise': u'08:21', 'sunset': u'16:09'},
 {'day': u'4. Dez 2012', 'sunrise': u'08:22', 'sunset': u'16:09'},
 {'day': u'5. Dez 2012', 'sunrise': u'08:23', 'sunset': u'16:08'},
 {'day': u'6. Dez 2012', 'sunrise': u'08:25', 'sunset': u'16:08'},
 {'day': u'7. Dez 2012', 'sunrise': u'08:26', 'sunset': u'16:07'}]

Make your life easier by using CSS Selectors

I know I have come late to party but I have a nice suggestion for you.

Using BeautifulSoup is already been suggested I would rather prefer using CSS Selectors to scrape data inside HTML

import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

main_url = "http://www.example.com"

main_page_html  = tryAgain(main_url)
main_page_soup = BeautifulSoup(main_page_html)

# Scrape all TDs from TRs inside Table
for tr in main_page_soup.select("table.class_of_table"):
   for td in tr.select("td#id"):
       print(td.text)
       # For acnhors inside TD
       print(td.select("a")[0].text)
       # Value of Href attribute
       print(td.select("a")[0]["href"])

# This is method that scrape URL and if it doesnt get scraped, waits for 20 seconds and then tries again. (I use it because my internet connection sometimes get disconnects)
def tryAgain(passed_url):
    try:
        page  = requests.get(passed_url,headers = random.choice(header), timeout = timeout_time).text
        return page
    except Exception:
        while 1:
            print("Trying again the URL:")
            print(passed_url)
            try:
                page  = requests.get(passed_url,headers = random.choice(header), timeout = timeout_time).text
                print("-------------------------------------")
                print("---- URL was successfully scraped ---")
                print("-------------------------------------")
                return page
            except Exception:
                time.sleep(20)
                continue