Trying to grab just absolute links from a webpage using BeautifulSoup
- by Kevin
I am reading the contents of a webpage using BeautifulSoup. What I want is to just grab the <a href> that start with http://. I know in beautifulsoup you can search by the attributes. I guess I am just having a syntax issue. I would imagine it would go something like.
page = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.linkpages.com")
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
for link in soup.findAll('a'):
if link['href'].startswith('http://'):
print links
But that returns:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
File "C:\Python26\lib\BeautifulSoup.py", line 598, in __getitem__
return self._getAttrMap()[key]
KeyError: 'href'
Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
EDIT
This isn't for any site in particular. The script gets the url from the user. So internal link targets would be an issue, that's also why I only want the <'a'> from the pages. If I turn it towards www.reddit.com, it parses the beginning links and it gets to this:
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/top/">top</a>
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/saved/">saved</a>
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
File "C:\Python26\lib\BeautifulSoup.py", line 598, in __getitem__
return self._getAttrMap()[key]
KeyError: 'href'
