Question

My overall goal is isolate tags that contain a certain word in the text and have only those print to a text file.

So far, I have been able to extract particular the tag, in this case the and get those to print to a text file.

My question is once I’ve got all the text in the extracted, what can I do with it? I am having trouble figuring out a way to isolate a particular word and further trim the text down to only what I need.

Here is what I have so far:

import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

url = 'http://www.website.com'
page = urllib2.urlopen(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.read())

page = soup.findAll('title')

for element in page:    
    print element

file_name = raw_input("What do you want to name the file?> ")
text_file = open("/Users/user1/Projects/%s.txt" % file_name, "w")
text_file.write("%s" % page)
text_file.close()   

What gets returned to me is:

$<title>food</title>
<title>ball</title>
<title>car</title>
<title>desk</title>
<title>blue food</title>
<title>green food</title>
<title>red ball</title>

How would I get it to only print results that include ‘food’?

Answer 1

You can get the contents of an element using .string. If you only wish to include results with food, add a check for that:

for element in page:
    if 'food' in element.string:
        print element.string