Using Beautiful Soup to find specific class

Question

I am trying to use Beautiful Soup to scrape housing price data from Zillow.

I get the web page by property id, eg. http://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/18429834_zpid/

Answer 1

According to the W3.org Validator, there are a number of issues with the HTML such as stray closing tags and tags split across multiple lines. For example:

This kind of markup can make it much more difficult for BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML.

You may want to try running something to clean up the HTML, such as removing the line breaks and trailing spaces from the end of each line. BeautifulSoup can also clean up the HTML tree for you:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
tree = BeautifulSoup(bad_html)
good_html = tree.prettify()