Web Scraping - Output File

[SMac2347]

Hello,

I am having some difficulty generating the output I want from web
scraping. Specifically, the script I wrote, while it runs without any
errors, is not writing to the output file correctly. It runs, and
creates the output .txt file; however, the file is blank (ideally it
should be populated with a list of names).

I took the base of a program that I had before for a different data
gathering task, which worked beautifully, and edited it for my
purposes here. Any insight as to what I might be doing wrote would be
highly appreciated. Code is included below. Thanks!

import os
import re
import urllib2

outfile = open("Skadden.txt","w")

A = 1
Z = 26

for letter in range(A,Z):

for line in urllib2.urlopen("http://www.skadden.com/Index.cfm?
contentID=44&alphaSearch="+str(letter)):

x = line
if '"><B>' in line:
start=x.find('"><B>"')
end= x.find('</B></A></nobr></td>',start)
name=x[start:end]
outfile.write(name+"\n")
print name

 

[SMac2347]

Hello,

I am having some difficulty generating the output I want from web
scraping. Specifically, the script I wrote, while it runs without any
errors, is not writing to the output file correctly. It runs, and
creates the output .txt file; however, the file is blank (ideally it
should be populated with a list of names).

I took the base of a program that I had before for a different data
gathering task, which worked beautifully, and edited it for my
purposes here. Any insight as to what I might be doing wrote would be
highly appreciated. Code is included below. Thanks!

import os
import re
import urllib2

outfile = open("Skadden.txt","w")

A = 1
Z = 26

for letter in range(A,Z):

     for line in urllib2.urlopen("http://www.skadden.com/Index.cfm?contentID=44&alphaSearch="+str(letter)):

You need
  alphaSearch=a
but you're using
  alphaSearch=1

             x = line
             if '"><B>' in line:

                     start=x.find('"><B>"')
Ditto.

                     end= x.find('</B></A></nobr></td>',start)
                     name=x[start:end]

                     outfile.write(name+"\n")
                     print name

Your code is bound to break over and over (you should do some smarter parsing), but here's a working version:

--->
import os
import re
import urllib2

outfile = open("Skadden.txt","w")

A = ord('a')
Z = ord('z')

for letter in range(A, Z):
    for line in urllib2.urlopen("http://www.skadden.com/Index.cfm?contentID=44&alphaSearch="+chr(letter)):
            x = line
            if ' ><B>' in line:
                    start=x.find(' ><B>')
                    end= x.find('</B></A></nobr></td>',start)
                    name=x[start+5:end]
                    outfile.write(name+"\n")
                    print name
<---

Kiuhnm

Great, thanks so much for your help!