retrieve links from web page using python and BeautifulSoup

Question

How can I retrieve the links of a webpage and copy the url address of the links using Python?

Answer 1

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.