CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlpython-3.xweb-scrapingbeautifulsoup
user2023
user2023

Reputation: 488

Python extracting only the First href link for every nth occurence in the for loop

I am trying simple web scraping using python, but there is problem fetching link names as there are 2 to 3 href headers in the same class btn as mentioned below whereas i need only the first one to be printed for every new occurrence in the loop.

#!/usr/bin/python3
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

url = "https://www.learndatasci.com/free-data-science-books/"

# Getting the webpage, creating a Response object.
response = requests.get(url)

# Extracting the source code of the page.
data = response.text

# Passing the source code to BeautifulSoup to create a BeautifulSoup object for it.
soup = BeautifulSoup(data, 'lxml')

# Extracting all the <a> tags into a list.
tags = soup.find_all('a', class_='btn')

# Extracting URLs from the attribute href in the <a> tags.
for tag in tags:
    print(tag.get('href'))

Output from the above code:

http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~tfl2/artificial-intelligence-modern-approach.9780131038059.25368.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0136042597/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0136042597&linkCode=as2&tag=learnds-20&linkId=3FRORB7P56CEWSK5
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/papers/ftml_book.pdf
http://amzn.to/1WePh0N
http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=9575
http://amzn.to/1FcalRp

While desired Output:

http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~tfl2/artificial-intelligence-modern-approach.9780131038059.25368.pdf
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/papers/ftml_book.pdf
http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=9575

Upvotes: 1

Views: 186

Answers (1)

Martijn Pieters
Martijn Pieters

Reputation: 1125398

BeautifulSoup has excellent CSS support, just use that to pick every odd item:

soup = BeautifulSoup(data, 'lxml')
for tag in soup.select('a.btn:nth-of-type(odd)'):

Demo:

>>> for tag in soup.select('a.btn:nth-of-type(odd)'): print(tag['href'])
...
http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~tfl2/artificial-intelligence-modern-approach.9780131038059.25368.pdf
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/papers/ftml_book.pdf
http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=9575
... etc

You do have a parent <div class="book"> element per group of links you could make use of:

for tag in soup.select('.book a.btn:first-of-type'):

which would work for any number of links per book.

Upvotes: 2

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