Python web scraping involving HTML tags with attributes
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by rohanbk
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Published on 2009-09-08T02:23:25Z
Indexed on
2010/05/02
7:07 UTC
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I'm trying to make a web scraper that will parse a web-page of publications and extract the authors. The skeletal structure of the web-page is the following:
<html>
<body>
<div id="container">
<div id="contents">
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="author">####I want whatever is located here ###</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
I've been trying to use BeautifulSoup and lxml thus far to accomplish this task, but I'm not sure how to handle the two div tags and td tag because they have attributes. In addition to this, I'm not sure whether I should rely more on BeautifulSoup or lxml or a combination of both. What should I do?
At the moment, my code looks like what is below:
import re
import urllib2,sys
import lxml
from lxml import etree
from lxml.html.soupparser import fromstring
from lxml.etree import tostring
from lxml.cssselect import CSSSelector
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup, NavigableString
address='http://www.example.com/'
html = urllib2.urlopen(address).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
html=soup.prettify()
html=html.replace(' ', ' ')
html=html.replace('í','í')
root=fromstring(html)
I realize that a lot of the import statements may be redundant, but I just copied whatever I currently had in more source file.
EDIT: I suppose that I didn't make this quite clear, but I have multiple tags in page that I want to scrape.
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