[Tutor] Question regarding parsing HTML with BeautifulSoup

[Kent Johnson]

Shuai Jiang (Runiteking1) wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm working on a program that need to parse a financial document on the 
> internet
> using BeautifulSoup. Because of the nature of the information, it is all 
> grouped
> as a table. I needed to get 3 types of info and have succeeded quite 
> well using
> BeautifulSoup, but encountered problems on the third one.
> 
> My question is that is there any easy way to parse an HTML tables column
> easily using BeautifulSoup. I copied the table here and I need to 
> extract the EPS. The numbers are
> every sixth one from the  <tr> tag ex 2.27, 1.86, 1.61...

Here is one way, found with a little experimenting at the command prompt:

In [1]: data = '''<table id="INCS" style="width:580px" class="f10y" 
cellspacing="0">
<snip the rest of your data>
    ...: </table>'''
In [3]: from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as BS

In [4]: soup=BS(data)

In [11]: for tr in soup.table.findAll('tr'):
    ....:     print tr.contents[11].string
    ....:
    ....:
EPS
2.27
  1.86
1.61
  1.27
1.18
  0.84
0.73
  0.46
0.2
  0.0

Kent