Tommy Kaas wrote:
> Im trying to learn basic web scraping and starting from scratch. Im
> using Activepython 2.6.6
> I have uploaded a simple table on my web page and try to scrape it and
> will save the result in a text file. I will separate the columns in the
> file with
> #.
> It works fine but besides # I also get spaces between the columns in the
> text file. How do I avoid that?
> This is the script:
> import urllib2
> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
> f = open('tabeltest.txt', 'w')
> soup =
BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen('http://www.kaasogmulvad.dk/unv/python/tabelte
> st.htm').read())
> rows = soup.findAll('tr')
> for tr in rows:
> cols = tr.findAll('td')
> print >> f,
> cols[0].string,'#',cols[1].string,'#',cols[2].string,'#',cols[3].string
>
> f.close()
> And the text file looks like this:
> Kommunenr # Kommune # Region # Regionsnr
> 101 # København # Hovedstaden # 1084
> 147 # Frederiksberg # Hovedstaden # 1084
> 151 # Ballerup # Hovedstaden # 1084
> 153 # Brøndby # Hovedstaden # 1084
The print statement automatically inserts spaces, so you can either resort
to the write method
for i in range(4):
if i:
f.write("#")
f.write(cols[i].string)
which is a bit clumsy, or you build the complete line and then print it as a
whole:
print >> f, "#".join(col.string for col in cols)
Note that you have non-ascii characters in your data -- I'm surprised that
writing to a file works for you. I would expect that
import codecs
f = codecs.open("tmp.txt", "w", encoding="utf-8")
is needed to successfully write your data to a file
Peter
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