HTML file parsing in Python

Question

I have a very long html file that looks exactly like this - html file . I want to be able to parse the file such that I get the information in the form on a tuple .

Example:

<tr>
      <td>Cech</td>
      <td>Chelsea</td>
      <td>30</td>
      <td>£6.4</td>
</tr>

The above information will look like ("Cech", "Chelsea", 30, 6.4). However if you look closely at the link i posted, the html example i posted comes under a <h2>Goalkeepers</h2> tag. i need this tag too. So basically the result tuple will look like ("Cech", "Chelsea", 30, 6.4, Goalkeepers) . Further down the file a bunch of players come under <h2> tags of Midfielders , Defenders and Forwards.

I tried using beautifulsoup and ntlk libraries and got lost. So now I have the following code:

import nltk
from urllib import urlopen

url = "http://fantasy.premierleague.com/player-list/"
html = urlopen(url).read()
raw = nltk.clean_html(html)
print raw

which just strips of the html file of all the tags and gives something like this:

          Cech
          Chelsea
          30
          £6.4

Although I can write a bad piece of code that reads every line and can assign it to a tuple. i cannot come up with any solution which can also incorporate the player position ( the string present in the <h2> tags). Any solution / suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

The reason I am inclined towards using tuples i so that I can use unpacking and plan on populating a MySQl table with the unpacked values.

Answer 1

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from pprint import pprint

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
h2s = soup.select("h2") #get all h2 elements
tables = soup.select("table") #get all tables

first = True
title =""
players = []
for i,table in enumerate(tables):
    if first:
         #every h2 element has 2 tables. table size = 8, h2 size = 4
         #so for every 2 tables 1 h2
         title =  h2s[int(i/2)].text
    for tr in table.select("tr"):
        player = (title,) #create a player
        for td in tr.select("td"):
            player = player + (td.text,) #add td info in the player
        if len(player) > 1: 
            #If the tr contains a player and its not only ("Goalkeaper") add it
            players.append(player)
    first = not first
pprint(players)

output:

[('Goalkeepers', 'Cech', 'Chelsea', '30', '£6.4'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Hart', 'Man City', '28', '£6.4'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Krul', 'Newcastle', '21', '£5.0'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Ruddy', 'Norwich', '25', '£5.0'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Vorm', 'Swansea', '19', '£5.0'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Stekelenburg', 'Fulham', '6', '£4.9'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Pantilimon', 'Man City', '0', '£4.9'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Lindegaard', 'Man Utd', '0', '£4.9'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Butland', 'Stoke City', '0', '£4.9'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Foster', 'West Brom', '13', '£4.9'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Viviano', 'Arsenal', '0', '£4.8'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Schwarzer', 'Chelsea', '0', '£4.7'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Boruc', 'Southampton', '42', '£4.7'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Myhill', 'West Brom', '15', '£4.5'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Fabianski', 'Arsenal', '0', '£4.4'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Gomes', 'Tottenham', '0', '£4.4'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Friedel', 'Tottenham', '0', '£4.4'),
 ('Goalkeepers', 'Henderson', 'West Ham', '0', '£4.0'),
 ('Defenders', 'Baines', 'Everton', '43', '£7.7'),
 ('Defenders', 'Vertonghen', 'Tottenham', '34', '£7.0'),
 ('Defenders', 'Taylor', 'Cardiff City', '14', '£4.5'),
 ('Defenders', 'Zverotic', 'Fulham', '0', '£4.5'),
 ('Defenders', 'Davies', 'Hull City', '28', '£4.5'),
 ('Defenders', 'Flanagan', 'Liverpool', '0', '£4.5'),
 ('Defenders', 'Dawson', 'West Brom', '0', '£3.9'),
 ('Defenders', 'Potts', 'West Ham', '0', '£3.9'),
 ('Defenders', 'Spence', 'West Ham', '0', '£3.9'),
 ('Midfielders', 'Özil', 'Arsenal', '24', '£10.6'),
 ('Midfielders', 'Redmond', 'Norwich', '20', '£5.0'),
 ('Midfielders', 'Mavrias', 'Sunderland', '5', '£5.0'),
 ('Midfielders', 'Gera', 'West Brom', '0', '£5.0'),
 ('Midfielders', 'Essien', 'Chelsea', '0', '£4.9'),
 ('Midfielders', 'Brown', 'West Brom', '0', '£4.3'),
 ('Forwards', 'van Persie', 'Man Utd', '24', '£13.9'),
 ('Forwards', 'Cornelius', 'Cardiff City', '1', '£5.4'),
 ('Forwards', 'Elmander', 'Norwich', '7', '£5.4'),
 ('Forwards', 'Murray', 'Crystal Palace', '0', '£5.3'),
 ('Forwards', 'Vydra', 'West Brom', '2', '£5.3'),
 ('Forwards', 'Proschwitz', 'Hull City', '0', '£4.3')]