Question

Im making a small python script for auto logon to a website. But i’m stuck.

I’m looking to print into terminal a small part of the html, located within this tag in the html file on the site:

<td class=h3 align='right'>&nbsp;&nbsp;John Appleseed</td><td>&nbsp;<a href="members_myaccount.php"><img border=0 src="../tbs_v7_0/images/myaccount.gif" alt="My Account"></a></td>

But how do I extract and print just the name, John Appleseed?

I’m using Pythons’ Mechanize on a mac, by the way.

Answer 1

Mechanize is only good for fetching the html. Once you want to extract information from the html, you could use for example BeautifulSoup. (See also my answer to a similar question: Web mining or scraping or crawling? What tool/library should I use?)

Depending on where the <td> is located in the html (it’s unclear from your question), you could use the following code:

html = ... # this is the html you've fetched

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
# use this (gets all <td> elements)
cols = soup.findAll('td')
# or this (gets only <td> elements with class='h3')
cols = soup.findAll('td', attrs={"class" : 'h3'})
print cols[0].renderContents() # print content of first <td> element