Extracting Info From Webpage using urllib2

Question

Writting a part of a program that searches for a phrase on YouTube then i want it to get the url for the first video. but i cant figure how to get the url for the first video

Here is my code:

import urllib2, urllib

raw_i=raw_input("Search: ")
x = urllib.quote_plus(raw_i)
site1 = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s'%x)
y = site1.read()

this reads the search page but i want it to return just the url for the video

For example lets use the phrase "Coconut by Harry Nilsson"

here is the HTML for the first video

i want just the "/watch?v=Tbgv8PkO9eo" out of it to be returned

Thank You!

kiriloff · Accepted Answer

You can use HTMLParser. Create your own parser deriving from the Python class.

from HTMLParser import HTMLParser

class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):

    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        # Only parse the 'anchor' tag.
        if tag == "a":
           # Check the list of defined attributes.
           for name, value in attrs:
               # If href is defined, print it.
               if name == "href":
                   print name, "=", value

You create a parser and feed it with your html string.

your_html_string='\
                  \
                  \
                  \
                   \
                   \
                    \
                    \
                  4:32'

parser = MyHTMLParser()
parser.feed(your_html_string)

Result is

>>> 
href = /watch?v=Tbgv8PkO9eo

Extracting Info From Webpage using urllib2

Answers (1)

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