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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T04:26:09+00:00

Hi I cannot figure out how to find links which begin with certain text

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Hi I cannot figure out how to find links which begin with certain text for the life of me.
findall(‘a’) works fine, but it’s way too much. I just want to make a list of all links that begin with
http://www.nhl.com/ice/boxscore.htm?id=

Can anyone help me?

Thank you very much

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    First set up a test document and open up the parser with BeautifulSoup:

    >>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> doc = '<html><body><div><a href="something">yep</a></div><div><a href="http://www.nhl.com/ice/boxscore.htm?id=3">somelink</a></div><a href="http://www.nhl.com/ice/boxscore.htm?id=7">another</a></body></html>'
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(doc)
>>> print soup.prettify()
<html>
 <body>
  <div>
   <a href="something">
    yep
   </a>
  </div>
  <div>
   <a href="http://www.nhl.com/ice/boxscore.htm?id=3">
    somelink
   </a>
  </div>
  <a href="http://www.nhl.com/ice/boxscore.htm?id=7">
   another
  </a>
 </body>
</html>

    Next, we can search for all <a> tags with an href attribute starting with http://www.nhl.com/ice/boxscore.htm?id=. You can use a regular expression for it:

    >>> import re
>>> soup.findAll('a', href=re.compile('^http://www.nhl.com/ice/boxscore.htm\?id='))
[<a href="http://www.nhl.com/ice/boxscore.htm?id=3">somelink</a>, <a href="http://www.nhl.com/ice/boxscore.htm?id=7">another</a>]
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