How to extract URLs from an HTML page in Python

Question

I have to write a web crawler in Python. I don't know how to parse a page and extract the URLs from HTML. Where should I go and study to write such a program?

In other words, is there a simple python program which can be used as a template for a generic web crawler? Ideally it should use modules which are relatively simple to use and it should include plenty of comments to describe what each line of code is doing.

Answer 1

Look at example code below. The script extracts html code of a web page (here Python home page) and extracts all the links in that page. Hope this helps.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://www.python.org"
response = requests.get(url)
# parse html
page = str(BeautifulSoup(response.content))


def getURL(page):
    """

    :param page: html of web page (here: Python home page) 
    :return: urls in that page 
    """
    start_link = page.find("a href")
    if start_link == -1:
        return None, 0
    start_quote = page.find('"', start_link)
    end_quote = page.find('"', start_quote + 1)
    url = page[start_quote + 1: end_quote]
    return url, end_quote

while True:
    url, n = getURL(page)
    page = page[n:]
    if url:
        print(url)
    else:
        break

Output:

/
#left-hand-navigation
#content-body
/search
/about/
/news/
/doc/
/download/
/getit/
/community/
/psf/
http://docs.python.org/devguide/
/about/help/
http://pypi.python.org/pypi
/download/releases/2.7.3/
http://docs.python.org/2/
/ftp/python/2.7.3/python-2.7.3.msi
/ftp/python/2.7.3/Python-2.7.3.tar.bz2
/download/releases/3.3.0/
http://docs.python.org/3/
/ftp/python/3.3.0/python-3.3.0.msi
/ftp/python/3.3.0/Python-3.3.0.tar.bz2
/community/jobs/
/community/merchandise/
/psf/donations/
http://wiki.python.org/moin/Languages
http://wiki.python.org/moin/Languages
http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/b6v58qvojllt0i6ql654r1vh00%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/j7gov1cmnqr9tvg14k621j7t5c%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
http://pycon.org/#calendar
http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/3haig2m9msslkpf2tn1h56nn9g%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
http://pycon.org/#calendar
http://www.psfmember.org

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