Getting a URL from hyperlinks using BeautifulSoup in Python

Question

I scraped a webpage using BeautifulSoup, assigned to 'soup'. I can get the text 'Aberdeen' by just adding .text onto the end of 'site_url'.

What I really want to get is the complete url in a string, e.g. "http://www.somewebsite.com/networks/site-info?site_id=ABD"

>>>site_link = soup.find_all('a', string='Aberdeen')[0]
>>>site_row = site_link.findParent('td').findParent('tr')
>>>site_column = site_row.findAll('td')
>>>site_url = site_column[0].contents[0]
>>>print(site_url)

<a href="../networks/site-info?site_id=ABD">Aberdeen</a>

I have not had any luck so far and do not know what else to try. How can I get the url?

The page I am trying to scrape is uk-air.defra.gov.uk/latest/currentlevels and I am interested in the urls corresponding to the site names in the first columns of the table e.g. uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=ACTH for the first name which is Auchencorth Moss — pjdavis
– pjdavis, Commented Aug 15, 2017 at 10:15
@N.Ivanov I have tried something similar but the problem is that there are many different types of links on the page, I just want the said links — pjdavis
– pjdavis, Commented Aug 15, 2017 at 10:17

Dan-Dev · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-15 11:44:41Z

You can use a regular expression to get the links the use urljoin to get the correct URLs.

import requests
import re

try:
    from urlparse import urljoin  # Python2
except ImportError:
    from urllib.parse import urljoin  # Python3

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url= 'https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/latest/currentlevels'
r = requests.get(url, headers={'User-Agent': 'Not blank'})
data = r.text
soup = BeautifulSoup(data, 'html.parser')
for elem in soup('a', href=re.compile(r'site_id')):
    print (elem.text)
    print (urljoin(url,elem['href']))

Outputs:

Auchencorth Moss
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=ACTH
Bush Estate
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=BUSH
Dumbarton Roadside
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=DUMB
Edinburgh St Leonards
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=ED3
Glasgow Great Western Road
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=GGWR
Glasgow High Street
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=GHSR
...

If you just want Aberdeen use:

for elem in soup('a',href=re.compile(r'site_id'), string='Aberdeen'):

instead of:

for elem in soup('a', href=re.compile(r'site_id')):

Outputs:

Aberdeen
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=ABD

SIM · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-21 22:24:20Z

Try this. I hope it will meet all your requirements:

import requests ; from lxml import html

base_link = "https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk"
response = requests.get("https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/latest/currentlevels", headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.81 Safari/537.36'}).text
tree = html.fromstring(response)
for title in tree.cssselect("table.current_levels_table td a:not(.smalltext)"):
    print(base_link + title.attrib['href'][2:])

Partial results:

https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=ACTH
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=BUSH
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=DUMB
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=ED3
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=GGWR
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=GHSR
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=GLA4

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