Question

import urllib2

website = "WEBSITE"
openwebsite = urllib2.urlopen(website)
html = getwebsite.read()

print html

So far so good.

But I want only href links from the plain text HTML. How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

Try with Beautifulsoup:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2
import re

html_page = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.yourwebsite.com")
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_page)
for link in soup.findAll('a'):
    print link.get('href')

In case you just want links starting with http://, you should use:

soup.findAll('a', attrs={'href': re.compile("^http://")})

In Python 3 with BS4 it should be:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib.request

html_page = urllib.request.urlopen("http://www.yourwebsite.com")
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_page, "html.parser")
for link in soup.findAll('a'):
    print(link.get('href'))