How to get span value using python,BeautifulSoup

Question

I am using BeautifulSoup for the first time and trying to collect several data such as email,phone number, and mailing address from a soup object.

Using regular expressions, I can identify the email address. My code to find the email is:

def get_email(link):
mail_list = []
for i in link:
        a = str(i)
        email_pattern = re.compile("<a\s+href=\"mailto:([a-zA-Z0-9._@]*)\">", re.IGNORECASE)
        ik = re.findall(email_pattern, a)
        if (len(ik) == 1):
                mail_list.append(i)
        else:
                pass
s_email = str(mail_list[0]).split('<a href="')
t_email = str(s_email[1]).split('">')
print t_email[0]

Now, I also need to collect the phone number, mailing address and web url. I think in BeautifulSoup there must be an easy way to find those specific data.

A sample html page is as below:

<ul>
    <li>
    <span>Email:</span>
    <a href="mailto:[email protected]">Message Us</a>
    </li>
    <li>
    <span>Website:</span>
    <a target="_blank" href="http://www.abcl.com">Visit Our Website</a>
    </li>
    <li>
    <span>Phone:</span>
    (123)456-789
    </li>
    </ul>

And using BeatifulSoup, I am trying to collect the span values of Email, website and Phone.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The most obvious problem with your code is that you're turning the object representing the link back into HTML and then parsing it with a regular expression again - that ignores much of the point of using BeautifulSoup in the first place. You might need to use a regular expression to deal with the contents of the href attribute, but that's it. Also, the else: pass is unnecessary - you can just leave it out entirely.

Here's some code that does something like what you want, and might be a useful starting point:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import re

# Assuming that html is your input as a string:
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

all_contacts = []

def mailto_link(e):
    '''Return the email address if the element is is a mailto link,
    otherwise return None'''
    if e.name != 'a':
        return None
    for key, value in e.attrs:
        if key == 'href':
            m = re.search('mailto:(.*)',value)
            if m:
                return m.group(1)
    return None

for ul in soup.findAll('ul'):
    contact = {}
    for li in soup.findAll('li'):
        s = li.find('span')
        if not (s and s.string):
            continue
        if s.string == 'Email:':
            a = li.find(mailto_link)
            if a:
                contact['email'] = mailto_link(a)
        elif s.string == 'Website:':
            a = li.find('a')
            if a:
                contact['website'] = a['href']
        elif s.string == 'Phone:':
            contact['phone'] = unicode(s.nextSibling).strip()
    all_contacts.append(contact)

print all_contacts

That will produce a list of one dictionary per contact found, in this case that will just be:

[{'website': u'http://www.abcl.com', 'phone': u'(123)456-789', 'email': u'[email protected]'}]