Does Python allow variables to be passed into function for dynamic screen scraping?

Laura Creighton lac at openend.se
Sat Nov 28 17:28:25 EST 2015


In a message of Sat, 28 Nov 2015 14:03:10 -0800, ryguy7272 writes:
>I'm looking at this URL.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_place_names
>
>If I hit F12 I can see tags such as these:
><a title=
><a class=
>And so on and so forth.  
>
>I'm wondering if someone can share a script, or a function, that will allow me to pass in variables and download (or simply print) the results.  I saw a sample online that I thought would work, and I made a few modifications but now I keep getting a message that says: ValueError: All objects passed were None
>
>Here's the script that I'm playing around with.
>
>import requests
>import pandas as pd
>from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>
>#Get the relevant webpage set the data up for parsing
>url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_place_names"
>r = requests.get(url)
>soup=BeautifulSoup(r.content,"lxml")
>
>#set up a function to parse the "soup" for each category of information and put it in a DataFrame
>def get_match_info(soup,tag,class_name):
>    info_array=[]
>    for info in soup.find_all('%s'%tag,attrs={'class':'%s'%class_name}):
>        return pd.DataFrame(info_array)
>
>#for each category pass the above function the relevant information i.e. tag names
>tag1 = get_match_info(soup,"td","title")
>tag2 = get_match_info(soup,"td","class")
>
>#Concatenate the DataFrames to present a final table of all the above info 
>match_info = pd.concat([tag1,tag2],ignore_index=False,axis=1)
>
>print match_info
>
>I'd greatly appreciate any help with this.

Post your error traceback.  If you are getting Value Errors about None,
then probably something you expect to return a match, isn't.  But without
the actual error, we cannot help much.

Laura




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