retrieve links from web page using python and BeautifulSoup [closed]

Answer 1

BeatifulSoup's own parser can be slow. It might be more feasible to use lxml which is capable of parsing directly from a URL (with some limitations mentioned below).

import lxml.html

doc = lxml.html.parse(url)

links = doc.xpath('//a[@href]')

for link in links:
    print link.attrib['href']

The code above will return the links as is, and in most cases they would be relative links or absolute from the site root. Since my use case was to only extract a certain type of links, below is a version that converts the links to full URLs and which optionally accepts a glob pattern like *.mp3. It won't handle single and double dots in the relative paths though, but so far I didn't have the need for it. If you need to parse URL fragments containing ../ or ./ then urlparse.urljoin might come in handy.

NOTE: Direct lxml url parsing doesn't handle loading from https and doesn't do redirects, so for this reason the version below is using urllib2 + lxml.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
import urllib2
import urlparse
import lxml.html
import fnmatch

try:
    import urltools as urltools
except ImportError:
    sys.stderr.write('To normalize URLs run: `pip install urltools --user`')
    urltools = None


def get_host(url):
    p = urlparse.urlparse(url)
    return "{}://{}".format(p.scheme, p.netloc)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    url = sys.argv[1]
    host = get_host(url)
    glob_patt = len(sys.argv) > 2 and sys.argv[2] or '*'

    doc = lxml.html.parse(urllib2.urlopen(url))
    links = doc.xpath('//a[@href]')

    for link in links:
        href = link.attrib['href']

        if fnmatch.fnmatch(href, glob_patt):

            if not href.startswith(('http://', 'https://' 'ftp://')):

                if href.startswith('/'):
                    href = host + href
                else:
                    parent_url = url.rsplit('/', 1)[0]
                    href = urlparse.urljoin(parent_url, href)

                    if urltools:
                        href = urltools.normalize(href)

            print href

The usage is as follows:

getlinks.py http://stackoverflow.com/a/37758066/191246
getlinks.py http://stackoverflow.com/a/37758066/191246 "*users*"
getlinks.py http://fakedomain.mu/somepage.html "*.mp3"