beautifulsoup Getting started with beautifulsoup A BeautifulSoup "Hello World" scraping example

Example

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

main_url = "https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world"
req = requests.get(main_url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(req.text, "html.parser")

# Finding the main title tag.
title = soup.find("h1", class_ = "firstHeading")
print title.get_text()

# Finding the mid-titles tags and storing them in a list.
mid_titles = [tag.get_text() for tag in soup.find_all("span", class_ = "mw-headline")]

# Now using css selectors to retrieve the article shortcut links
links_tags = soup.select("li.toclevel-1")
for tag in links_tags:
    print tag.a.get("href")

# Retrieving the side page links by "blocks" and storing them in a dictionary
side_page_blocks = soup.find("div",
                            id = "mw-panel").find_all("div",
                                                      class_ = "portal")
blocks_links = {}
for num, block in enumerate(side_page_blocks):
    blocks_links[num] = [link.get("href") for link in block.find_all("a", href = True)]

print blocks_links[0]

Output:

"Hello, World!" program
#Purpose
#History
#Variations
#See_also
#References
#External_links
[u'/wiki/Main_Page', u'/wiki/Portal:Contents', u'/wiki/Portal:Featured_content', u'/wiki/Portal:Current_events', u'/wiki/Special:Random', u'https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserRedirector?utm_source=donate&utm_medium=sidebar&utm_campaign=C13_en.wikipedia.org&uselang=en', u'//shop.wikimedia.org']

Entering your prefered parser when instanciating Beautiful Soup avoids the usual Warning declaring that no parser was explicitely specified.

Different methods can be used to find an element within the webpage tree.

Although a handful of other methods exist, CSS classes and CSS selectors are two handy ways to find elements in the tree.

It should be noted that we can look for tags by setting their attribute value to True when searching them.

get_text() allows us to retrieve text contained within a tag. It returns it as a single Unicode string. tag.get("attribute") allows to get a tag's attribute value.