What is wrong with my web scraper code (python3.4)

Question

I am trying to scrape a table from a website. It runs but I am not getting an output to my file. Where am I going wrong?

Code:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import urllib.request

f = open('nbapro.txt','w')
errorFile = open('nbaerror.txt','w')

page = urllib.request.urlopen('http://www.numberfire.com/nba/fantasy/full-fantasy-basketball-projections')

content = page.read()
soup =  BeautifulSoup(content)

tableStats = soup.find('table', {'class': 'data-table xsmall'})
for row in tableStats.findAll('tr')[2:]:
 col = row.findAll('td')

 try: 
    name = col[0].a.string.strip()
    f.write(name+'\n')
 except Exception as e:
    errorFile.write (str(e) + '******'+ str(col) + '\n')
    pass

f.close
errorFile.close

Answer 1

The problem is that the table data you are trying to scrape is filled out by invoking javascript code on the browser-side. urllib is not a browser and, hence, cannot execute javascript.

If you want to solve it via urllib and BeautifulSoup , you have to extract the JSON object from the script tag and load it via json.loads() . Example, that prints player names:

import json
import re
import urllib.request
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib.request.urlopen('http://www.numberfire.com/nba/fantasy/full-fantasy-basketball-projections'))

script = soup.find('script', text=lambda x: x and 'NF_DATA' in x).text
data = re.search(r'NF_DATA = (.*?);', script).group(1)
data = json.loads(data)

for player_id, player in data['players'].items():
    print(player['name'] + ' ' + player['last_name'])