Question

I am trying to write some data to csv file by checking some condition as below

I will have a list of urls in a text file as below

urls.txt

www.example.com/3gusb_form.aspx?cid=mum
www.example_second.com/postpaid_mum.aspx?cid=mum
www.example_second.com/feedback.aspx?cid=mum

Now i will go through each url from the text file and read the content of the url using urllib2 module in python and will search a string in the entire html page. If the required string founds i will write that url in to a csv file.

But when i am trying to write data(url) in to csv file,it is saving like each character in to one coloumn as below instead of saving entire url(data) in to one column

h   t   t   p   s   :   /   /   w   w   w...... 

Code.py

import urllib2
import csv

search_string = 'Listen Capcha'

html_urls = open('/path/to/input/file/urls.txt','r').readlines()
outputcsv = csv.writer(open('output/path' + 'urls_contaning _%s.csv'%search_string, "wb"),delimiter=',', quoting=csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL)
outputcsv.writerow(['URL'])

for url in html_urls:
    url = url.replace('\n','').strip()
    if not len(url) == 0:
        req = urllib2.Request(url)
        response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
        if str(search_string) in response.read():
            outputcsv.writerow(url)

So whats wrong with the above code, what needs to be done in order to save the entire url(string) in to one column in a csv file ?

Also how can we write data to a text file as above ?

Edited

Also i had a url suppose like http://www.vodafone.in/Pages/tuesdayoffers_che.aspx ,
this url will be redirected to http://www.vodafone.in/pages/home_che.aspx?cid=che in browser actually, but when i tried through code as below it is same as the above given url

import urllib2, httplib

httplib.HTTPConnection.debuglevel = 1  
request = urllib2.Request("http://www.vodafone.in/Pages/tuesdayoffers_che.aspx")
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
f = opener.open(request)
print f.geturl()

Result

http://www.vodafone.in/pages/tuesdayoffers_che.aspx?cid=che 

So finally how to catch the redirected url with urllib2 and fetch the data from it ?

Answer 1

Change the last line to:

            outputcsv.writerow([url])