scrape a website using python code example

Example 1: web scraper python

def get_names():
    """
    Downloads the page where the list of mathematicians is found
    and returns a list of strings, one per mathematician
    """
    url = 'http://www.fabpedigree.com/james/mathmen.htm'
    response = simple_get(url)

    if response is not None:
        html = BeautifulSoup(response, 'html.parser')
        names = set()
        for li in html.select('li'):
            for name in li.text.split('\n'):
                if len(name) > 0:
                    names.add(name.strip())
        return list(names)

    # Raise an exception if we failed to get any data from the url
    raise Exception('Error retrieving contents at {}'.format(url))

Example 2: web scraper python

>>> raw_html = simple_get('http://www.fabpedigree.com/james/mathmen.htm')
>>> html = BeautifulSoup(raw_html, 'html.parser')
>>> for i, li in enumerate(html.select('li')):
        print(i, li.text)

0  Isaac Newton
 Archimedes
 Carl F. Gauss
 Leonhard Euler
 Bernhard Riemann

1  Archimedes
 Carl F. Gauss
 Leonhard Euler
 Bernhard Riemann

2  Carl F. Gauss
 Leonhard Euler 
 Bernhard Riemann

 3  Leonhard Euler
 Bernhard Riemann

4  Bernhard Riemann

# 5 ... and many more...