Beautiful Soup line matching

Question

Im trying to build a html table that only contains the table header and the row that is relevant to me. The site I'm using is http://wolk.vlan77.be/~gerben.

I'm trying to get the the table header and my the table entry so I do not have to look each time for my own name.

What I want to do :

• get the html page
• Parse it to get the header of the table
• Parse it to get the line with table tags relevant to me (so the table row containing lucas)
• Build a html page that shows the header and table entry relevant to me

What I am doing now :

• get the header with beautifulsoup first
• get my entry
• add both to an array

• pass this array to a method that generates a string that can be printed as html page

  def downloadURL(self): global input filehandle = self.urllib.urlopen('http://wolk.vlan77.be/~gerben') input = '' for line in filehandle.readlines(): input += line filehandle.close()

  def soupParserToTable(self,input):
      global header
  
      soup = self.BeautifulSoup(input)
      header = soup.first('tr')
      tableInput='0'
  
      table = soup.findAll('tr')
      for line in table:
          print line
          print '\n \n'
          if '''lucas''' in line:
              print 'true'
          else:
              print 'false'
          print '\n \n **************** \n \n'
  

I want to get the line from the html file that contains lucas, however when I run it like this I get this in my output :

 **************** 


<tr><td>lucas.vlan77.be</td> <td><span style="color:green;font-weight:bold">V</span></td> <td><span style="color:green;font-weight:bold">V</span></td> <td><span style="color:green;font-weight:bold">V</span></td> </tr>



false

Now I don't get why it doesn't match, the string lucas is clearly in there :/ ?

Answer 1

It looks like you're over-complicating this.

Here's a simpler version...

>>> import BeautifulSoup
>>> import urllib2
>>> html = urllib2.urlopen('http://wolk.vlan77.be/~gerben')
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(html)
>>> print soup.find('td', text=lambda data: data.string and 'lucas' in data.string)
lucas.vlan77.be

Answer 2

It's because line is not a string, but BeautifulSoup.Tag instance. Try to get td value instead:

if '''lucas''' in line.td.string: