On 26/04/2012 18:54, smac2...@comcast.net wrote:
Hello,
I am having some difficulty generating the output I want from web
scraping. Specifically, the script I wrote, while it runs without any
errors, is not writing to the output file correctly. It runs, and
creates the output .txt file; however, the file is blank (ideally it
should be populated with a list of names).
I took the base of a program that I had before for a different data
gathering task, which worked beautifully, and edited it for my
purposes here. Any insight as to what I might be doing wrote would be
highly appreciated. Code is included below. Thanks!
import os
import re
import urllib2
outfile = open("Skadden.txt","w")
A = 1
Z = 26
for letter in range(A,Z):
for line in urllib2.urlopen("http://www.skadden.com/Index.cfm?
contentID=44&alphaSearch="+str(letter)):
x = line
if '"><B>' in line:
start=x.find('"><B>"')
end= x.find('</B></A></nobr></td>',start)
name=x[start:end]
outfile.write(name+"\n")
print name
Firstly, 'letter' goes from 1 (inclusive) to 26 (exclusive), so the
URLs are:
http://www.skadden.com/Index.cfm?contentID=44&alphaSearch=1
http://www.skadden.com/Index.cfm?contentID=44&alphaSearch=2
...
http://www.skadden.com/Index.cfm?contentID=44&alphaSearch=25
What you need is:
http://www.skadden.com/Index.cfm?contentID=44&alphaSearch=A
http://www.skadden.com/Index.cfm?contentID=44&alphaSearch=B
...
http://www.skadden.com/Index.cfm?contentID=44&alphaSearch=Z
Secondly, the names in the HTML source aren't enclosed by '"><B>' and
'</B></A></nobr></td>'.
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