How to print only a specific link in Python

Question

I'm still a newbie in Python but I'm trying to make my first little program. My intention is to print only the link ending with .m3u8 (if available) istead of printing the whole web page. The code I'm currently using:

import requests
channel1 = requests.get('https://website.tv/user/111111')
print(channel1.content)
print('\n')
channel2 = requests.get('https://website.tv/user/222222')
print(channel2.content)
print('\n')
input('Press Enter to Exit...')

The link I'm looking for always has 47 characters in total, and it's always the same model just changing the stream id represented as X:

https://website.tv/live/streamidXXXXXXXXX.m3u8

Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

You can use regex for this problem.

Explanation:

here in the expression portion .*? means to consider everything and whatever enclosed in \b(expr)\b needs to be present there mandatorily.

For e.g.:

import re

link="https://website.tv/live/streamidXXXXXXXXX.m3u8"

p=re.findall(r'.*?\b.m3u8\b',link)
print(p)

OUTPUT:

['https://website.tv/live/streamidXXXXXXXXX.m3u8']

Answer 2

There are a few ways to go about this, one that springs to mind which others have touched upon is using regex with findall that returns back a list of matched urls from our url_list.

Another option could also be BeautifulSoup but without more information regarding the html structure it may not be the best tool here.

Using Regex

from re import findall
from requests import get


def check_link(response):
    result = findall(
        r'.*?\b.m3u8\b',
        str(response.content),
    )
    return result

def main(url):
    response = get(url)
    if response.ok:
        link_found = check_link(response)
        if link_found:
            print('link {} found at {}'.format(
                    link_found,
                    url,
                ),
            )

if __name__ == '__main__':
    url_list = [
        'http://www.test_1.com',
        'http://www.test_2.com',
        'http://www.test_3.com',
    ]
    for url in url_list:
        main(url)

    print("All finished")