Question

I have this code in my views.py:

from django.http import HttpResponse, Http404
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib

def extract_links(request):
    starting_link = urllib.urlopen("http://www.finalyearondesk.com")
    soup = BeautifulSoup(starting_link)
    all_links = soup.findAll('a', href = True)          
    return render_to_response('extracted_links.html',{'all_links': all_links })

In this I am usign BeautifulSoup.
And i am writing this code in the template file: extracted_links.html:

{% for final_links in all_links %}
    {{ final_links['href'] }}    # {{ final_links.href }} did not print anything
{% endfor %}

But the problem is it shows an error:

Could not parse the remainder: '['href']' from 'final_links['href']'

Any suggestion how to solve this? If I use this function on a simple python file, it just works fine but not on django template

Answer 1

Try:

{% for final_links in all_links %}
   {{ final_links.attrMap.href }}
{% endfor %}

I arrived at that from the following session:

>>> import urllib
>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as BS
>>> start = urllib.urlopen('http://blog.tkbe.org')
>>> soup = BS(start)
>>> all_links = soup.findAll('a', href=True)
>>> first = all_links[0]
>>> first
<a href="http://blog.tkbe.org/" title="TKBE" rel="home">TKBE</a>
>>> dir(first)
[..., 'attrMap', 'attrs', ...]
>>> first.attrs
[(u'href', u'http://blog.tkbe.org/'), (u'title', u'TKBE'), (u'rel', u'home')]
>>> first.attrMap
{u'href': u'http://blog.tkbe.org/', u'rel': u'home', u'title': u'TKBE'}

If your version of BeautifulSoup has other attributes you can find them similarly.

You might have to extract them in the view though, and not in the template, e.g.:

all_links = [link.attrMap['href'] for link in all_links]

before your return statement (or whichever attribute you need to access in your version of BeautifulSoup).