Not able to scrape html table from a website using python script

Question

I was actually trying to scrape the the "Name" column in the table shown in this link and save it as a csv file.

I wrote a python script like below:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
import csv


# Step 1: Sending a HTTP request to a URL
url = "https://myaccount.umn.edu/lookup?SET_INSTITUTION=UMNTC&type=name&CN=University+of+Minnesota&campus=a&role=any"
# Make a GET request to fetch the raw HTML content
html_content = requests.get(url).text


# Step 2: Parse the html content
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, "lxml")
# print(soup.prettify()) # print the parsed data of html


# Step 3: Analyze the HTML tag, where your content lives
# Create a data dictionary to store the data.
data = {}
#Get the table having the class wikitable
gdp_table = soup.find("table")
gdp_table_data = gdp_table.find_all("th")  # contains 2 rows

# Get all the headings of Lists
headings = []
for td in gdp_table_data[0].find_all("td"):
    # remove any newlines and extra spaces from left and right
    headings.append(td.b.text.replace('\n', ' ').strip())

# Get all the 3 tables contained in "gdp_table"
for table, heading in zip(gdp_table_data[1].find_all("table"), headings):
    # Get headers of table i.e., Rank, Country, GDP.
    t_headers = []
    for th in table.find_all("th"):
        # remove any newlines and extra spaces from left and right
        t_headers.append(th.text.replace('\n', ' ').strip())

    # Get all the rows of table
    table_data = []
    for tr in table.tbody.find_all("tr"): # find all tr's from table's tbody
        t_row = {}
        # Each table row is stored in the form of
        # t_row = {'Rank': '', 'Country/Territory': '', 'GDP(US$million)': ''}

        # find all td's(3) in tr and zip it with t_header
        for td, th in zip(tr.find_all("td"), t_headers): 
            t_row[th] = td.text.replace('\n', '').strip()
        table_data.append(t_row)

    # Put the data for the table with his heading.
    data[heading] = table_data
    print("table_data")

But when I run this script I am not getting anything. Please help me with this

Answer 1

It seems like your list gdp_table_data[0].find_all("td") is empty, hence explaining that you don't find anything (your for-loops are not doing anything). Without more context on your strategy, it's hard to help.

By the way, if you're not against using an external library, using pandas would make it super easy to scrape this kind of webpage. Just so you know:

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> url = "https://myaccount.umn.edu/lookup?SET_INSTITUTION=UMNTC&type=name&CN=University+of+Minnesota&campus=a&role=any"
>>> df = pd.read_html(url)[0]
>>> print(df)
                                                  Name              Email  Work Phone  Phone          Dept/College
 0      AIESEC at the University of Minnesota (aiesec)     aiesec@umn.edu         NaN    NaN  Student Organization
 1   Ayn Rand Study Group University of Minnesota (...    aynrand@umn.edu         NaN    NaN                   NaN
 2                               Balance UMD (balance)  balance@d.umn.edu         NaN    NaN  Student Organization
 3   Christians on Campus the University of Minneso...     cocumn@umn.edu         NaN    NaN  Student Organization
 4          Climb Club University of Minnesota (climb)      climb@umn.edu         NaN    NaN  Student Organization
 ..                                                ...                ...         ...    ...                   ...
 74   University of Minnesota Tourism Center (tourism)    tourism@umn.edu         NaN    NaN            Department
 75  University of Minnesota Treasury Accounting (t...   treasury@umn.edu         NaN    NaN            Department
 76  University of Minnesota Twin Cities HOSA (umnh...    umnhosa@umn.edu         NaN    NaN  Student Organization
 77           University of Minnesota U Write (uwrite)                NaN         NaN    NaN            Department
 78        University of Minnesota VoiceMail (cs-vcml)    cs-vcml@umn.edu         NaN    NaN  OIT Network & Design

 [79 rows x 5 columns]

Now, getting only names is super easy:

>>> print(df.Name)
0        AIESEC at the University of Minnesota (aiesec)
1     Ayn Rand Study Group University of Minnesota (...
2                                 Balance UMD (balance)
3     Christians on Campus the University of Minneso...
4            Climb Club University of Minnesota (climb)
                            ...
74     University of Minnesota Tourism Center (tourism)
75    University of Minnesota Treasury Accounting (t...
76    University of Minnesota Twin Cities HOSA (umnh...
77             University of Minnesota U Write (uwrite)
78          University of Minnesota VoiceMail (cs-vcml)
Name: Name, Length: 79, dtype: object

To export only that column into a .csv use:

>>> df[["Name"]].to_csv("./filename.csv")