Question

I am trying to parse a table with two columns and insert the text from each column into two lists.

I need some ideas how to do it.

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

s = """<table><tr><td valign="top" width="25%"><b>Text1</b><a href="#">Link1</a>:</b></td><td>AAAA<a href="#">BBBB</a></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top" width="25%"><b>Text2:</b></td><td>CCCC<a href="#">DDDD</a></td></tr>
<tr><td valign="top" width="25%"><b><a href="#">Link2</a>:</b></td><td><a href="#">EEEE</a> FFFF</td></tr></table>
<tr><td valign="top" width="25%"><b>Text3 <br> Text4:</b></td><td><a href="#">EEEE</a> FFFF</td></tr></table>"""

a = BeautifulSoup(s)

b = a.findAll('td', text=True)

left = []
right = []

for i in b:
    print i

What I get:

Text1
Link1
:
AAAA
BBBB

What I need:

left = [“Text1”, “Link1”]
right = [AAAA”, “BBBB”]

Answer 1

Get the row first, and then get the cell:

left = []
right = []

for tr in a.findAll('tr'):
    l, r = tr.findAll('td')
    left.extend(l.findAll(text=True))
    right.extend(r.findAll(text=True))

I haven’t tested this, but pretty sure it should work 🙂

EDIT: fixed (hopefully)