More on Urllib, and Urllib2

[CracKPod]

On 28 Jun., 01:42, Alex Bryan <alexnbr... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Okay, so I am having issues figuring anything out about this and have  
> read the "missing manual" about it so please don't send me that link  
> again. To put it simply I want to be able to input a word and get the  
> definition from dictionary.com. Now I found a work-around for  
> searching for the word, I just make it in the actual address. For  
> example I want to search for cheese, I can just do a:
>
> urllib2.urlopen("http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cheese")
>
> However, the actual definition is in javascript on the page. I used  
> firebug to see it, and the first def, looks like this:
>
> <table class="luna-Ent">
> <tbody>
> <tr>
> <td class="dn" valign="top">1.</td>
> <td valign="top">the curd of milk separated from the whey and prepared  
> in many ways as a food. </td>
>
> the problem being that if I use code like this to get the html of that  
> page in python:
>
> response = urllib2.urlopen("the webiste....")
> html = response.read()
> print html
>
> I get the html source of the page, but no table with my definitions.  
> So what can I do? Also, is there a book or a better tutorial or  
> explanation of this urllib2, and urllib? If so, PLEASE let me know  
> about it; I will be eternally grateful.

It would probably be a good idea to take a look at mechanize:
http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/
and at BeautifulSoup: http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

Greetz,
CracKPod