How to extract html links with a matching word from a website using python

Question

I have an url, say http://www.bbc.com/news/world/asia/. Just in this page I wanted to extract all the links that has India or INDIA or india (should be case in

Answer 1

You need to search for the word india in the displayed text. To do this you'll need a custom function instead:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

url = "http://www.bbc.com/news/world/asia/"
r = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content)

india_links = lambda tag: (getattr(tag, 'name', None) == 'a' and
                           'href' in tag.attrs and
                           'india' in tag.get_text().lower())
results = soup.find_all(india_links)

The india_links lambda finds all tags that are <a> links with an href attribute and contain india (case insensitive) somewhere in the displayed text.

Note that I used the requests response object .content attribute; leave decoding to BeautifulSoup!

Demo:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> import requests
>>> url = "http://www.bbc.com/news/world/asia/"
>>> r = requests.get(url)
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content)
>>> india_links = lambda tag: getattr(tag, 'name', None) == 'a' and 'href' in tag.attrs and 'india' in tag.get_text().lower()
>>> results = soup.find_all(india_links)
>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> pprint(results)
[<a href="/news/world/asia/india/">India</a>,
 <a class="story" href="/news/world-asia-india-30647504" rel="published-1420102077277">India scheme to monitor toilet use </a>,
 <a class="story" href="/news/world-asia-india-30640444" rel="published-1420022868334">India to scrap tax breaks on cars</a>,
 <a class="story" href="/news/world-asia-india-30640436" rel="published-1420012598505">India shock over Dhoni retirement</a>,
 <a href="/news/world/asia/india/">India</a>,
 <a class="headline-anchor" href="/news/world-asia-india-30630274" rel="published-1419931669523"><img alt="A Delhi police officer with red flag walks amidst morning fog in Delhi, India, Monday, Dec 29, 2014. " src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/79979000/jpg/_79979280_79979240.jpg"/><span class="headline heading-13">India fog continues to cause chaos</span></a>,
 <a class="headline-anchor" href="/news/world-asia-india-30632852" rel="published-1419940599384"><span class="headline heading-13">Court boost to India BJP chief</span></a>,
 <a class="headline-anchor" href="/sport/0/cricket/30632182" rel="published-1419930930045"><span class="headline heading-13">India captain Dhoni quits Tests</span></a>,
 <a class="story" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-radio-and-tv-15386555" rel="published-1392018507550"><img alt="A woman riding a scooter waits for a traffic signal along a street in Mumbai February 5, 2014." src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/72866000/jpg/_72866856_020889093.jpg"/>Special report: India Direct</a>,
 <a href="/2/hi/south_asia/country_profiles/1154019.stm">India</a>]

Note the http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-radio-and-tv-15386555 link here; we had to use the lambda search because a search with a text regular expression would not have found that element; the contained text (Special report: India Direct) is not the only element in the tag and thus would not be found.

A similar problem applies to the /news/world-asia-india-30632852 link; the nested <span> element makes it that the Court boost to India BJP chief headline text is not a direct child element of the link tag.

You can extract just the links with:

from urllib.parse import urljoin

result_links = [urljoin(url, tag['href']) for tag in results]

where all relative URLs are resolved relative to the original URL:

>>> from urllib.parse import urljoin
>>> result_links = [urljoin(url, tag['href']) for tag in results]
>>> pprint(result_links)
['http://www.bbc.com/news/world/asia/india/',
 'http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30647504',
 'http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30640444',
 'http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30640436',
 'http://www.bbc.com/news/world/asia/india/',
 'http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30630274',
 'http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30632852',
 'http://www.bbc.com/sport/0/cricket/30632182',
 'http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-radio-and-tv-15386555',
 'http://www.bbc.com/2/hi/south_asia/country_profiles/1154019.stm']