I'm using Python BS4/lxml to parse an xml-formatted RSS feed (specifically https://itch.io/games/on-sale.xml). I'm finding that in the transition from Requests receiving the page data and BS4 reading it from text, the name of the link field is being changed. Specifically, res.text contains ...</saleends><link>https://foo.itch.io/bar</link><description>... but reading it into BS4/lxml and printing that results in ...</saleends><link/>https://foo.itch.io/bar<description>..., which BS4 is unable to parse correctly. My code is available here, line 237.
I can provide a stripped-down version of the project without the login and logging pieces for easy testing.
Edit with simplified code:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
res = requests.get("https://itch.io/feed/sales.xml")
soup = BeautifulSoup(res.text, 'lxml')
print(soup.item.link)
Expected behavior: Prints "https://itch.io/s/12345/foobar" (whatever the most recent link in the RSS is)
Actual behavior: Prints "<link/>"
lxml is lxml's HTML parser and lxml-xml and xml are lxml's XML parser. (Refer this answer which points to this documentation)
So, instead of using lxml parser, you should use lxml-xml or xml parser.
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
res = requests.get("https://itch.io/feed/sales.xml")
soup = BeautifulSoup(res.text, 'lxml-xml')
print(soup.item.link.text)
Output:
https://itch.io/s/38593/halloween-event-sale
I would like to retrieve data given in a SDMX file (like https://www.bundesbank.de/cae/servlet/StatisticDownload?tsId=BBK01.ST0304&its_fileFormat=sdmx&mode=its). I tried to use BeautifulSoup, but it seems, it does not see the tags. In the following the code
import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "https://www.bundesbank.de/cae/servlet/StatisticDownload?tsId=BBK01.ST0304&its_fileFormat=sdmx"
html_source = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_source, 'lxml')
ts_series = soup.findAll("bbk:Series")
which gives me an empty object.
Is BS4 the wrong tool, or (more likely) what am I doing wrong?
Thanks in advance
soup.findAll("bbk:series") would return the result.
In fact, in this case, even you use lxml as the parser, BeautifulSoup still parse it as html, since html tags are case insensetive, BeautifulSoup downcases all the tags, thus soup.findAll("bbk:series") works. See Other parser problems from the official doc.
If you want to parse it as xml, use soup = BeautifulSoup(html_source, 'xml') instead. It also uses lxml since lxml is the only xml parser BeautifulSoup has. Now you can use ts_series = soup.findAll("Series") to get the result as beautifulSoup will strip the namespace part bbk.
I am trying to get all the urls on a website using python. At the moment I am just copying the websites html into the python program and then using code to extract all the urls. Is there a way I could do this straight from the web without having to copy the entire html?
In Python 2, you can use urllib2.urlopen:
import urllib2
response = urllib2.urlopen('http://python.org/')
html = response.read()
In Python 3, you can use urllib.request.urlopen:
import urllib.request
with urllib.request.urlopen('http://python.org/') as response:
html = response.read()
If you have to perform more complicated tasks like authentication or passing parameters I suggest to have a look at the requests library.
The most straightforward would probably be urllib.urlopen if you're using python2, or urllib.request.urlopen if you're using python3 (you have to do import urllib or import urllib.request first of course). That way you get an file like object from which you can read (ie f.read()) the html document.
Example for python 2:
import urllib
f = urlopen("http://stackoverflow.com")
http_document = f.read()
f.close()
The good news is that you seem to have done the hard part which is analyzing the html document for links.
You might want to use the bs4(BeautifulSoup) library.
Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files.
You can download bs4 with the followig command at the cmd line. pip install BeautifulSoup4
import urllib2
import urlparse
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "http://www.google.com"
response = urllib2.urlopen(url)
content = response.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(content, "html.parser")
for link in soup.find_all('a', href=True):
print urlparse.urljoin(url, link['href'])
You can simply use the combination of requests and BeautifulSoup.
First make an HTTP request using requests to get the HTML content. You will get it as a Python string, which you can manipulate as you like.
Take the HTML content string and supply it into the BeautifulSoup, which has done all the job to extract the DOM, and get all URLs, i.e. <a> elements.
Here is an example of how to fetch all links from StackOverflow:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, SoupStrainer
response = requests.get('http://stackoverflow.com')
html_str = response.text
bs = BeautifulSoup(html_str, parseOnlyThese=SoupStrainer('a'))
for a_element in bs:
if a_element.has_attr('href'):
print(a_element['href'])
Sample output:
/questions/tagged/facebook-javascript-sdk
/questions/31743507/facebook-app-request-dialog-keep-loading-on-mobile-after-fb-login-called
/users/3545752/user3545752
/questions/31743506/get-nuspec-file-for-existing-nuget-package
/questions/tagged/nuget
...
I'm using Python3, BeautifulSoup4
When I run code below, it gives just url "www.google.com" not XML.
I couldn't find it What is wrong.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib
html = "www.google.com"
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
print (soup.prettify())
You need to use urllib2 or a similar library to fetch the HTML
import urllib2
html = urllib2.urlopen("www.google.com")
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
print (soup.prettify())
EDIT: Just as a side note to clarify why I suggested urllib2. If you read the urllib documentation, you'll find "The urlopen() function has been removed in Python 3 in favor of urllib2.urlopen()." Given that you have tagged Python3, urllib2 would probably be your best option.
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How can I retrieve the links of a webpage and copy the url address of the links using Python?
Here's a short snippet using the SoupStrainer class in BeautifulSoup:
import httplib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, SoupStrainer
http = httplib2.Http()
status, response = http.request('http://www.nytimes.com')
for link in BeautifulSoup(response, parse_only=SoupStrainer('a')):
if link.has_attr('href'):
print(link['href'])
The BeautifulSoup documentation is actually quite good, and covers a number of typical scenarios:
https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/
Edit: Note that I used the SoupStrainer class because it's a bit more efficient (memory and speed wise), if you know what you're parsing in advance.
For completeness sake, the BeautifulSoup 4 version, making use of the encoding supplied by the server as well:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib.request
parser = 'html.parser' # or 'lxml' (preferred) or 'html5lib', if installed
resp = urllib.request.urlopen("http://www.gpsbasecamp.com/national-parks")
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp, parser, from_encoding=resp.info().get_param('charset'))
for link in soup.find_all('a', href=True):
print(link['href'])
or the Python 2 version:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2
parser = 'html.parser' # or 'lxml' (preferred) or 'html5lib', if installed
resp = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.gpsbasecamp.com/national-parks")
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp, parser, from_encoding=resp.info().getparam('charset'))
for link in soup.find_all('a', href=True):
print link['href']
and a version using the requests library, which as written will work in both Python 2 and 3:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from bs4.dammit import EncodingDetector
import requests
parser = 'html.parser' # or 'lxml' (preferred) or 'html5lib', if installed
resp = requests.get("http://www.gpsbasecamp.com/national-parks")
http_encoding = resp.encoding if 'charset' in resp.headers.get('content-type', '').lower() else None
html_encoding = EncodingDetector.find_declared_encoding(resp.content, is_html=True)
encoding = html_encoding or http_encoding
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.content, parser, from_encoding=encoding)
for link in soup.find_all('a', href=True):
print(link['href'])
The soup.find_all('a', href=True) call finds all <a> elements that have an href attribute; elements without the attribute are skipped.
BeautifulSoup 3 stopped development in March 2012; new projects really should use BeautifulSoup 4, always.
Note that you should leave decoding the HTML from bytes to BeautifulSoup. You can inform BeautifulSoup of the characterset found in the HTTP response headers to assist in decoding, but this can be wrong and conflicting with a <meta> header info found in the HTML itself, which is why the above uses the BeautifulSoup internal class method EncodingDetector.find_declared_encoding() to make sure that such embedded encoding hints win over a misconfigured server.
With requests, the response.encoding attribute defaults to Latin-1 if the response has a text/* mimetype, even if no characterset was returned. This is consistent with the HTTP RFCs but painful when used with HTML parsing, so you should ignore that attribute when no charset is set in the Content-Type header.
Others have recommended BeautifulSoup, but it's much better to use lxml. Despite its name, it is also for parsing and scraping HTML. It's much, much faster than BeautifulSoup, and it even handles "broken" HTML better than BeautifulSoup (their claim to fame). It has a compatibility API for BeautifulSoup too if you don't want to learn the lxml API.
Ian Blicking agrees.
There's no reason to use BeautifulSoup anymore, unless you're on Google App Engine or something where anything not purely Python isn't allowed.
lxml.html also supports CSS3 selectors so this sort of thing is trivial.
An example with lxml and xpath would look like this:
import urllib
import lxml.html
connection = urllib.urlopen('http://www.nytimes.com')
dom = lxml.html.fromstring(connection.read())
for link in dom.xpath('//a/#href'): # select the url in href for all a tags(links)
print link
import urllib2
import BeautifulSoup
request = urllib2.Request("http://www.gpsbasecamp.com/national-parks")
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(response)
for a in soup.findAll('a'):
if 'national-park' in a['href']:
print 'found a url with national-park in the link'
The following code is to retrieve all the links available in a webpage using urllib2 and BeautifulSoup4:
import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.espncricinfo.com/").read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(url)
for line in soup.find_all('a'):
print(line.get('href'))
Links can be within a variety of attributes so you could pass a list of those attributes to select.
For example, with src and href attributes (here I am using the starts with ^ operator to specify that either of these attributes values starts with http):
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
import requests
r = requests.get('https://stackoverflow.com/')
soup = bs(r.content, 'lxml')
links = [item['href'] if item.get('href') is not None else item['src'] for item in soup.select('[href^="http"], [src^="http"]') ]
print(links)
Attribute = value selectors
[attr^=value]
Represents elements with an attribute name of attr whose value is prefixed (preceded) by value.
There are also the commonly used $ (ends with) and * (contains) operators. For a full syntax list see the link above.
Under the hood BeautifulSoup now uses lxml. Requests, lxml & list comprehensions makes a killer combo.
import requests
import lxml.html
dom = lxml.html.fromstring(requests.get('http://www.nytimes.com').content)
[x for x in dom.xpath('//a/#href') if '//' in x and 'nytimes.com' not in x]
In the list comp, the "if '//' and 'url.com' not in x" is a simple method to scrub the url list of the sites 'internal' navigation urls, etc.
just for getting the links, without B.soup and regex:
import urllib2
url="http://www.somewhere.com"
page=urllib2.urlopen(url)
data=page.read().split("</a>")
tag="<a href=\""
endtag="\">"
for item in data:
if "<a href" in item:
try:
ind = item.index(tag)
item=item[ind+len(tag):]
end=item.index(endtag)
except: pass
else:
print item[:end]
for more complex operations, of course BSoup is still preferred.
This script does what your looking for, But also resolves the relative links to absolute links.
import urllib
import lxml.html
import urlparse
def get_dom(url):
connection = urllib.urlopen(url)
return lxml.html.fromstring(connection.read())
def get_links(url):
return resolve_links((link for link in get_dom(url).xpath('//a/#href')))
def guess_root(links):
for link in links:
if link.startswith('http'):
parsed_link = urlparse.urlparse(link)
scheme = parsed_link.scheme + '://'
netloc = parsed_link.netloc
return scheme + netloc
def resolve_links(links):
root = guess_root(links)
for link in links:
if not link.startswith('http'):
link = urlparse.urljoin(root, link)
yield link
for link in get_links('http://www.google.com'):
print link
To find all the links, we will in this example use the urllib2 module together
with the re.module
*One of the most powerful function in the re module is "re.findall()".
While re.search() is used to find the first match for a pattern, re.findall() finds all
the matches and returns them as a list of strings, with each string representing one match*
import urllib2
import re
#connect to a URL
website = urllib2.urlopen(url)
#read html code
html = website.read()
#use re.findall to get all the links
links = re.findall('"((http|ftp)s?://.*?)"', html)
print links
Why not use regular expressions:
import urllib2
import re
url = "http://www.somewhere.com"
page = urllib2.urlopen(url)
page = page.read()
links = re.findall(r"<a.*?\s*href=\"(.*?)\".*?>(.*?)</a>", page)
for link in links:
print('href: %s, HTML text: %s' % (link[0], link[1]))
Here's an example using #ars accepted answer and the BeautifulSoup4, requests, and wget modules to handle the downloads.
import requests
import wget
import os
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, SoupStrainer
url = 'https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/eeg-mld/eeg_full/'
file_type = '.tar.gz'
response = requests.get(url)
for link in BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser', parse_only=SoupStrainer('a')):
if link.has_attr('href'):
if file_type in link['href']:
full_path = url + link['href']
wget.download(full_path)
I found the answer by #Blairg23 working , after the following correction (covering the scenario where it failed to work correctly):
for link in BeautifulSoup(response.content, 'html.parser', parse_only=SoupStrainer('a')):
if link.has_attr('href'):
if file_type in link['href']:
full_path =urlparse.urljoin(url , link['href']) #module urlparse need to be imported
wget.download(full_path)
For Python 3:
urllib.parse.urljoin has to be used in order to obtain the full URL instead.
BeatifulSoup's own parser can be slow. It might be more feasible to use lxml which is capable of parsing directly from a URL (with some limitations mentioned below).
import lxml.html
doc = lxml.html.parse(url)
links = doc.xpath('//a[#href]')
for link in links:
print link.attrib['href']
The code above will return the links as is, and in most cases they would be relative links or absolute from the site root. Since my use case was to only extract a certain type of links, below is a version that converts the links to full URLs and which optionally accepts a glob pattern like *.mp3. It won't handle single and double dots in the relative paths though, but so far I didn't have the need for it. If you need to parse URL fragments containing ../ or ./ then urlparse.urljoin might come in handy.
NOTE: Direct lxml url parsing doesn't handle loading from https and doesn't do redirects, so for this reason the version below is using urllib2 + lxml.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
import urllib2
import urlparse
import lxml.html
import fnmatch
try:
import urltools as urltools
except ImportError:
sys.stderr.write('To normalize URLs run: `pip install urltools --user`')
urltools = None
def get_host(url):
p = urlparse.urlparse(url)
return "{}://{}".format(p.scheme, p.netloc)
if __name__ == '__main__':
url = sys.argv[1]
host = get_host(url)
glob_patt = len(sys.argv) > 2 and sys.argv[2] or '*'
doc = lxml.html.parse(urllib2.urlopen(url))
links = doc.xpath('//a[#href]')
for link in links:
href = link.attrib['href']
if fnmatch.fnmatch(href, glob_patt):
if not href.startswith(('http://', 'https://' 'ftp://')):
if href.startswith('/'):
href = host + href
else:
parent_url = url.rsplit('/', 1)[0]
href = urlparse.urljoin(parent_url, href)
if urltools:
href = urltools.normalize(href)
print href
The usage is as follows:
getlinks.py http://stackoverflow.com/a/37758066/191246
getlinks.py http://stackoverflow.com/a/37758066/191246 "*users*"
getlinks.py http://fakedomain.mu/somepage.html "*.mp3"
There can be many duplicate links together with both external and internal links. To differentiate between the two and just get unique links using sets:
# Python 3.
import urllib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "http://www.espncricinfo.com/"
resp = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
# Get server encoding per recommendation of Martijn Pieters.
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp, from_encoding=resp.info().get_param('charset'))
external_links = set()
internal_links = set()
for line in soup.find_all('a'):
link = line.get('href')
if not link:
continue
if link.startswith('http'):
external_links.add(link)
else:
internal_links.add(link)
# Depending on usage, full internal links may be preferred.
full_internal_links = {
urllib.parse.urljoin(url, internal_link)
for internal_link in internal_links
}
# Print all unique external and full internal links.
for link in external_links.union(full_internal_links):
print(link)
import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
a=urllib2.urlopen('http://dir.yahoo.com')
code=a.read()
soup=BeautifulSoup(code)
links=soup.findAll("a")
#To get href part alone
print links[0].attrs['href']