How to scrape href with Python 3.5 and BeautifulSo

Question

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• retrieve links from web page using python and BeautifulSoup 15 answers

I want to scrape the href of every project from the website https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=16&woe_id=23424829&sort=magic&seed=2449064&page=1 with Python 3.5 and BeautifulSoup.

That's my code

#Loading Libraries
import urllib
import urllib.request
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

#define URL for scraping
theurl = "https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=16&woe_id=23424829&sort=magic&seed=2449064&page=1"
thepage = urllib.request.urlopen(theurl)

#Cooking the Soup
soup = BeautifulSoup(thepage,"html.parser")


#Scraping "Link" (href)
project_ref = soup.findAll('h6', {'class': 'project-title'})
project_href = [project.findChildren('a')[0].href for project in project_ref if project.findChildren('a')]
print(project_href)

I get [None, None, .... None, None] back. I need a list with all the href from the class .

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Try something like this:

import urllib.request
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

theurl = "https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=16&woe_id=23424829&sort=magic&seed=2449064&page=1"
thepage = urllib.request.urlopen(theurl)

soup = BeautifulSoup(thepage)

project_href = [i['href'] for i in soup.find_all('a', href=True)]
print(project_href)

This will return all the href instances. As i see in your link, a lot of href tags have # inside them. You can avoid these with a simple regex for proper links, or just ignore the # symboles.

project_href = [i['href'] for i in soup.find_all('a', href=True) if i['href'] != "#"]

This will still give you some trash links like /discover?ref=nav, so if you want to narrow it down use a proper regex for the links you need.

EDIT:

To solve the problem you mentioned in the comments:

soup = BeautifulSoup(thepage)
for i in soup.find_all('div', attrs={'class' : 'project-card-content'}):
    print(i.a['href'])