Article scraping with beautifulsoup: scraping all <p> tags

Question

I wrote a script that pulls paragraphs from articles and writes them to a file. For some articles, it won't pull every paragraph. This is where I am lost. Any guidance would be deeply appreciated. I have included a link to a particular article where it isn't pulling all of the information. It scrapes everything up until the first quoted sentence.

URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/06/us-syria-crisis-assad-insight-idUSBREA250SD20140306

# Ask user to enter URL
url = raw_input("Please enter a valid URL: ")

# Open txt document for output
txt = open('ctp_output.txt', 'w')

# Parse HTML of article
soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen(url).read())

# retrieve all of the paragraph tags
tags = soup('p')
for tag in tags:
    txt.write(tag.get_text() + '\n' + '\n')

Answer 1

This is what works for me:

import urllib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/06/us-syria-crisis-assad-insight-idUSBREA250SD20140306"

soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen(url))

with open('ctp_output.txt', 'w') as f:
    for tag in soup.find_all('p'):
        f.write(tag.text.encode('utf-8') + '\n')

Note that you should use with context manager while working with files. Also you can pass urllib2.urlopen(url) directly to the BeautifulSoup constructor since urlopen returns a file-like object.

Hope that helps.