retrieve links from web page using python and BeautifulSoup

Here's a short snippet using the SoupStrainer class in BeautifulSoup:

import httplib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, SoupStrainer

http = httplib2.Http()
status, response = http.request('http://www.nytimes.com')

for link in BeautifulSoup(response, parse_only=SoupStrainer('a')):
    if link.has_attr('href'):
        print(link['href'])

The BeautifulSoup documentation is actually quite good, and covers a number of typical scenarios:

https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/

Edit: Note that I used the SoupStrainer class because it's a bit more efficient (memory and speed wise), if you know what you're parsing in advance.

Others have recommended BeautifulSoup, but it's much better to use lxml. Despite its name, it is also for parsing and scraping HTML. It's much, much faster than BeautifulSoup, and it even handles "broken" HTML better than BeautifulSoup (their claim to fame). It has a compatibility API for BeautifulSoup too if you don't want to learn the lxml API.

Ian Blicking agrees.

There's no reason to use BeautifulSoup anymore, unless you're on Google App Engine or something where anything not purely Python isn't allowed.

lxml.html also supports CSS3 selectors so this sort of thing is trivial.

An example with lxml and xpath would look like this:

import urllib
import lxml.html
connection = urllib.urlopen('http://www.nytimes.com')

dom =  lxml.html.fromstring(connection.read())

for link in dom.xpath('//a/@href'): # select the url in href for all a tags(links)
    print link

For completeness sake, the BeautifulSoup 4 version, making use of the encoding supplied by the server as well:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib.request

parser = 'html.parser'  # or 'lxml' (preferred) or 'html5lib', if installed
resp = urllib.request.urlopen("http://www.gpsbasecamp.com/national-parks")
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp, parser, from_encoding=resp.info().get_param('charset'))

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

or the Python 2 version:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2

parser = 'html.parser'  # or 'lxml' (preferred) or 'html5lib', if installed
resp = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.gpsbasecamp.com/national-parks")
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp, parser, from_encoding=resp.info().getparam('charset'))

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

and a version using the requests library, which as written will work in both Python 2 and 3:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from bs4.dammit import EncodingDetector
import requests

parser = 'html.parser'  # or 'lxml' (preferred) or 'html5lib', if installed
resp = requests.get("http://www.gpsbasecamp.com/national-parks")
http_encoding = resp.encoding if 'charset' in resp.headers.get('content-type', '').lower() else None
html_encoding = EncodingDetector.find_declared_encoding(resp.content, is_html=True)
encoding = html_encoding or http_encoding
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.content, parser, from_encoding=encoding)

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

The soup.find_all('a', href=True) call finds all <a> elements that have an href attribute; elements without the attribute are skipped.

BeautifulSoup 3 stopped development in March 2012; new projects really should use BeautifulSoup 4, always.

Note that you should leave decoding the HTML from bytes to BeautifulSoup. You can inform BeautifulSoup of the characterset found in the HTTP response headers to assist in decoding, but this can be wrong and conflicting with a <meta> header info found in the HTML itself, which is why the above uses the BeautifulSoup internal class method EncodingDetector.find_declared_encoding() to make sure that such embedded encoding hints win over a misconfigured server.

With requests, the response.encoding attribute defaults to Latin-1 if the response has a text/* mimetype, even if no characterset was returned. This is consistent with the HTTP RFCs but painful when used with HTML parsing, so you should ignore that attribute when no charset is set in the Content-Type header.