Question

I’m trying to parse a table with BeautifulSoup and finding that it is/would be helpful to know what row and column I’m looking at as I walk through it. Right now I’ve got this:

for table in soup.find_all("table", {"class":"foo"}):
    r = 0
    for row in table.find_all('tr'):            
        cells = row.find_all("td")
        c = 0
        for cell in cells:
            print "row", r, "cell", c
            print cell.attr
            c += 1
        r +=1

This dumps out some revealing info:

row 0 cell 0 
row 1 cell 0 
row 1 cell 1 
row 1 cell 2 
row 1 cell 3 
row 1 cell 4 
row 2 cell 0 
row 2 cell 1 
row 3 cell 0 
row 3 cell 1 

For some reason row[1] has a lot of extra columns. Handy to know. What I’m wondering is … is there a built-in variable that would report my place in the list.

Answer 1

Are you looking for enumerate?

for c,cell in enumerate(cells):
    ....