python BeautifulSoup parsing table

Updated Answer

If a programmer is interested in only parsing a table from a webpage, they can utilize the pandas method pandas.read_html.

Let's say we want to extract the GDP data table from the website: https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-gdp/#worldCountries

Then following codes does the job perfectly (No need of beautifulsoup and fancy html):

Using pandas only

# sometimes we can directly read from the website
url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFI%27s_100_Years...100_Movies#:~:text=%20%20%20%20Film%20%20%20,%20%204%20%2025%20more%20rows%20"
df = pd.read_html(url)
df.head()

Using pandas and requests (More General Case)


# if pd.read_html does not work, we can use pd.read_html using requests.
import pandas as pd
import requests

url = "https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-gdp/#worldCountries"

r = requests.get(url)
df_list = pd.read_html(r.text) # this parses all the tables in webpages to a list
df = df_list[0]
df.head()

Required modules

pip install lxml
pip install requests
pip install pandas

Output

First five lines of the table from the Website


Here you go:

data = []
table = soup.find('table', attrs={'class':'lineItemsTable'})
table_body = table.find('tbody')

rows = table_body.find_all('tr')
for row in rows:
    cols = row.find_all('td')
    cols = [ele.text.strip() for ele in cols]
    data.append([ele for ele in cols if ele]) # Get rid of empty values

This gives you:

[ [u'1359711259', u'SRF', u'08/05/2013', u'5310 4 AVE', u'K', u'19', u'125.00', u'$'], 
  [u'7086775850', u'PAS', u'12/14/2013', u'3908 6th Ave', u'K', u'40', u'125.00', u'$'], 
  [u'7355010165', u'OMT', u'12/14/2013', u'3908 6th Ave', u'K', u'40', u'145.00', u'$'], 
  [u'4002488755', u'OMT', u'02/12/2014', u'NB 1ST AVE @ E 23RD ST', u'5', u'115.00', u'$'], 
  [u'7913806837', u'OMT', u'03/03/2014', u'5015 4th Ave', u'K', u'46', u'115.00', u'$'], 
  [u'5080015366', u'OMT', u'03/10/2014', u'EB 65TH ST @ 16TH AV E', u'7', u'50.00', u'$'], 
  [u'7208770670', u'OMT', u'04/08/2014', u'333 15th St', u'K', u'70', u'65.00', u'$'], 
  [u'$0.00\n\n\nPayment Amount:']
]

Couple of things to note:

  • The last row in the output above, the Payment Amount is not a part of the table but that is how the table is laid out. You can filter it out by checking if the length of the list is less than 7.
  • The last column of every row will have to be handled separately since it is an input text box.

Tags:

Python

Beautifulsoup

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