Question

I’m trying to read data from a website that contains only text. I’d like to read only the data that follows “&values”. I’ve been able to open the entire website, but I don’t know how to get rid of the extraneous data and I don’t know any HTML. Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

The contents of that url look like url parameters. You could use urllib.parse_qs to parse them into a dict:

import urllib2
import urlparse

url = 'http://www.tip.it/runescape/gec/price_graph.php?avg=1&start=1327715574&mainitem=10350&item=10350'
response = urllib2.urlopen(url)
content = response.read()
params = urlparse.parse_qs(content)
print(params['values'])