Let’s discuss the concept of parsing using python. In python we have lot of modules but for parsing we only need urllib and re i.e regular expression. By using both of these libraries we can fetch the data on web pages.
Note that parsing of websites means that fetch the whole source code and that we want to search using a given url link, it will give you the output as the bulk of HTML content that you can’t understand. Let’s see the demonstration with an explanation to let you understand more about parsing.
Code #1: Libraries needed
# importing libraries import urllib.request import urllib.parse import re |
Code #2:
We have defined a url and some related values that we want to search. Remember that we define values as a dictionary and in this key value pair we define python programming to search on the defined url.
Code #3:
data = urllib.parse.urlencode(values) data = data.encode('utf-8') req = urllib.request.Request(url, data) resp = urllib.request.urlopen(req) respData = resp.read() |
In the first line we encode the values that we have defined earlier, then (line 2) we encode the same data that is understand by machine.
In 3rd line of code we request for values in the defined url, then use the module urlopen() to open the web document that HTML.
In the last line read() will help read the document line by line and assign it to respData named variable.
Code #4:
paragraphs = re.findall(r'<p>(.*?)</p>', str(respData)) for eachP in paragraphs: print(eachP) |
In order to extract the relevant data we apply regular expression. Second argument must be type string and if we want to print the data we apply simple print function.
Below are few examples:
Example #1:
import urllib.request import urllib.parse import re values = {'s':'python programming', 'submit':'search'} data = urllib.parse.urlencode(values) data = data.encode('utf-8') req = urllib.request.Request(url, data) resp = urllib.request.urlopen(req) respData = resp.read() paragraphs = re.findall(r'<p>(.*?)</p>',str(respData)) for eachP in paragraphs: print(eachP) |
Output:
Example #2:
import urllib.request import urllib.parse import re values = {'s':'pandas', 'submit':'search'} data = urllib.parse.urlencode(values) data = data.encode('utf-8') req = urllib.request.Request(url, data) resp = urllib.request.urlopen(req) respData = resp.read() paragraphs = re.findall(r'<p>(.*?)</p>',str(respData)) for eachP in paragraphs: print(eachP) |
Output:
