Question

I am receiving data from a web service and its replying me data in html form.The response data i am getting is this dropdown:

<span>

        <select name="country" id="country" class="text " style="width:170px;">
                        <option value="">-Select country-</option>
                                <option value="Russia" >Russia</option>
                                <option value="America" >America</option>
                                <option value="Spain" >Spain</option>
                                <option value="France" >France</option>
                                <option value="X - 15" >X - 15</option>


        </select>
</span>

I need to further process on this data and get option values in python list.How can i select all country names and collect them into a python list?

Answer 1

Check out beautiful soup.

In this case, you could do the following assuming you had your html block in the html var as a string:

 >>> import BeautifulSoup as bs
 >>>  
 >>>  html = bs.BeautifulSoup(html)
 >>>  html.findAll('option')

For even more syntactic sugar, check out soupselect.