Using urllib2 with BeautifulSoup in Python

In yesterdays post I gave an intro to BeautifulSoup.

Since BeautifulSoup is not getting the web page for you, you will have to use the urllib2 module to do that.

BeautifulSoup Example

Please see the comments in the code to see what it does

#import the library used to query a website
import urllib2

#specify the url you want to query
url = "http://www.python.org"

#Query the website and return the html to the variable 'page'
page = urllib2.urlopen(url)

#import the Beautiful soup functions to parse the data returned from the website
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

#Parse the html in the 'page' variable, and store it in Beautiful Soup format
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)

#to print the soup.head is the head tag and soup.head.title is the title tag
print soup.head
print soup.head.title

#to print the length of the page, use the len function
print len(page)

#create a new variable to store the data you want to find.
tags = soup.findAll('a')

#to print all the links
print tags

#to get all titles and print the contents of each title
titles = soup.findAll('span', attrs = { 'class' : 'titletext' })
for title in allTitles:
    print title.contents

In upcoming posts, I will write more about this awesome module.