python BeautifulSoup parsing table

Question

I'm learning python requests and BeautifulSoup. For an exercise, I've chosen to write a quick NYC parking ticket parser. I am able to get an html response which is quite ugly. I need to grab the lineItemsTable and parse all the tickets.

You can reproduce the page by going here: https://paydirect.link2gov.com/NYCParking-Plate/ItemSearch and entering a NY plate T630134C

soup = BeautifulSoup(plateRequest.text)
#print(soup.prettify())
#print soup.find_all('tr')

table = soup.find("table", { "class" : "lineItemsTable" })
for row in table.findAll("tr"):
    cells = row.findAll("td")
    print cells

Can someone please help me out? Simple looking for all tr does not get me anywhere.

Answer 1

Here you go:

data = []
table = soup.find('table', attrs={'class':'lineItemsTable'})
table_body = table.find('tbody')

rows = table_body.find_all('tr')
for row in rows:
    cols = row.find_all('td')
    cols = [ele.text.strip() for ele in cols]
    data.append([ele for ele in cols if ele]) # Get rid of empty values

This gives you:

[ [u'1359711259', u'SRF', u'08/05/2013', u'5310 4 AVE', u'K', u'19', u'125.00', u'$'], 
  [u'7086775850', u'PAS', u'12/14/2013', u'3908 6th Ave', u'K', u'40', u'125.00', u'$'], 
  [u'7355010165', u'OMT', u'12/14/2013', u'3908 6th Ave', u'K', u'40', u'145.00', u'$'], 
  [u'4002488755', u'OMT', u'02/12/2014', u'NB 1ST AVE @ E 23RD ST', u'5', u'115.00', u'$'], 
  [u'7913806837', u'OMT', u'03/03/2014', u'5015 4th Ave', u'K', u'46', u'115.00', u'$'], 
  [u'5080015366', u'OMT', u'03/10/2014', u'EB 65TH ST @ 16TH AV E', u'7', u'50.00', u'$'], 
  [u'7208770670', u'OMT', u'04/08/2014', u'333 15th St', u'K', u'70', u'65.00', u'$'], 
  [u'$0.00\n\n\nPayment Amount:']
]

Couple of things to note:

• The last row in the output above, the Payment Amount is not a part of the table but that is how the table is laid out. You can filter it out by checking if the length of the list is less than 7.
• The last column of every row will have to be handled separately since it is an input text box.