How to scrape web news and combine paragraphs into each article

Question

I´m scraping the new articles from this site https://nypost.com/search/China+COVID-19/page/2/?orderby=relevance I used for-loop to get the content of each news article, but I couldn´t able to combine paragraphs for each article. My goal is to store each article in a string, and all the strings should be stored in myarticle list.

When I print(myarticle[0]), it gives me all the articles. I expect it should give me one single article.

Any helps would be appreciated!

            for pagelink in pagelinks:
                #get page text
                page = requests.get(pagelink)
                #parse with BeautifulSoup
                soup = bs(page.text, 'lxml')
                containerr = soup.find("div", class_=['entry-content', 'entry-content-read-more'])
                articletext = containerr.find_all('p')
                for paragraph in articletext:
                    #get the text only
                    text = paragraph.get_text()
                    paragraphtext.append(text)
                    
                #combine all paragraphs into an article
                thearticle.append(paragraphtext)
            # join paragraphs to re-create the article 
            myarticle = [''.join(article) for article in thearticle]
    
    print(myarticle[0])

For clarification purpose, the full code is attached below

def scrape(url):
    user_agent = {'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0) like Gecko'}
    request = 0
    urls = [f"{url}{x}" for x in range(1,2)]
    params = {
       "orderby": "relevance",
    }
    pagelinks = []
    title = []
    thearticle = []
    paragraphtext = []
    for page in urls:
        response = requests.get(url=page,
                                headers=user_agent,
                                params=params) 
        # controlling the crawl-rate
        start_time = time() 
        #pause the loop
        sleep(randint(8,15))
        #monitor the requests
        request += 1
        elapsed_time = time() - start_time
        print('Request:{}; Frequency: {} request/s'.format(request, request/elapsed_time))
        clear_output(wait = True)

        #throw a warning for non-200 status codes
        if response.status_code != 200:
            warn('Request: {}; Status code: {}'.format(request, response.status_code))

        #Break the loop if the number of requests is greater than expected
        if request > 72:
            warn('Number of request was greater than expected.')
            break


        #parse the content
        soup_page = bs(response.text, 'lxml') 
        #select all the articles for a single page
        containers = soup_page.findAll("li", {'class': 'article'})
        
        #scrape the links of the articles
        for i in containers:
            url = i.find('a')
            pagelinks.append(url.get('href'))
        #scrape the titles of the articles
        for i in containers:
            atitle = i.find(class_ = 'entry-heading').find('a')
            thetitle = atitle.get_text()
            title.append(thetitle)
            for pagelink in pagelinks:
                #get page text
                page = requests.get(pagelink)
                #parse with BeautifulSoup
                soup = bs(page.text, 'lxml')
                containerr = soup.find("div", class_=['entry-content', 'entry-content-read-more'])
                articletext = containerr.find_all('p')
                for paragraph in articletext:
                    #get the text only
                    text = paragraph.get_text()
                    paragraphtext.append(text)
                    
                #combine all paragraphs into an article
                thearticle.append(paragraphtext)
            # join paragraphs to re-create the article 
            myarticle = [''.join(article) for article in thearticle]
    
    print(myarticle[0])

print(scrape('https://nypost.com/search/China+COVID-19/page/'))

Answer 1

You keep appending to an existing list [], it keeps growing, you need to clear it every loop.

    articletext = containerr.find_all('p')
    for paragraph in articletext:
        #get the text only
        text = paragraph.get_text()
        paragraphtext.append(text)

    #combine all paragraphs into an article
    thearticle.append(paragraphtext)
# join paragraphs to re-create the article 
myarticle = [''.join(article) for article in thearticle]

Should be something like

    articletext = containerr.find_all('p')
    thearticle = [] # clear from the previous loop
    paragraphtext = [] # clear from the previous loop
    for paragraph in articletext:
        #get the text only
        text = paragraph.get_text()
        paragraphtext.append(text)

    thearticle.append(paragraphtext)
    myarticle.append(thearticle)

But you could simplify it more to:

article = soup.find("div", class_=['entry-content', 'entry-content-read-more'])
myarticle.append(article.get_text())