Getting specific table from web page with BeautifulSoup

Question

I want to get the data from the 3rd table on http://www.dividend.com/dividend-stocks/ . Here is the code and I need some help.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://www.dividend.com/dividend-stocks/"
r = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, "html5lib")

# Skip first two tables
tables = soup.find("table")
tables = tables.find_next("table")
tables = tables.find_next("table")

row = ''
for td in tables.find_all("td"):
    if len(td.text.strip()) > 0:
        row = row + td.text.strip().replace('\n', ' ') +','
        # Handle last column in a row, remove extra comma and add new line
        if td.get('data-th') == 'Pay Date':
            row = row[:-1] + '\n'
print(row)

1. Is there a better way to skip the two tables? Or is there a simple way to skip a big block of code in beautiful soup? If so, how can I position it?
2. Somehow the output order of the code is different from the ones on the web. The table on the web looks like this:

but code output is like this:

AAPL,Apple Inc.,1.76%,$143.39,$2.52,5/11,5/18
GE,General Electric,3.32%,$28.91,$0.96,6/15,7/25
XOM,Exxon Mobil,3.71%,$83.03,$3.08,5/10,6/9
CVX,Chevron Corp,4.01%,$107.72,$4.32,5/17,6/12
BP,BP PLC ADR,6.66%,$35.72,$2.38,5/10,6/23

What did I do wrong? Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

You can use a selector to find a specific table:

tables = soup.select("table:nth-of-type(3)")

I'm not sure why your results are in a different order than they appear on the web page.

Answer 2

Although @Barmar 's method seems cleaner, here is another alternative using soup.find_all and saving to JSON (even though that wasn't in the description).

import json

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = 'http://www.dividend.com/dividend-stocks/'
r = requests.get(url)
r.raise_for_status()
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, 'lxml')
stocks = {}

# Skip first two tables and header row of target table
for tr in soup.find_all('table')[2].find_all('tr')[1:]:
    (stock_symbol, company_name, _, dividend_yield, current_price,
     annual_dividend, ex_dividend_date, pay_date) = [
        td.text.strip() for td in tr.find_all('td')]
    stocks[stock_symbol] = {
        'company_name': company_name,
        'dividend_yield': float(dividend_yield.rstrip('%')),
        'current_price': float(current_price.lstrip('$')),
        'annual_dividend': float(annual_dividend.lstrip('$')),
        'ex_dividend_date': ex_dividend_date,
        'pay_date': pay_date
    }

with open('stocks.json', 'w') as f:
    json.dump(stocks, f, indent=2)

Answer 3

Thanks @Barmar and @Delirious Lettuce for posting the solution and codes. Regarding the order of the output, I realized every time I refresh the data, I saw a glimpse of the data in the order of the output like I pulled. Then I see the sorted data. Tried a few different ways, I was able to use the Selenium webdriver to pull the data like the web presented. Thanks all.

BPT,BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust,21.12%,$20.80,$4.39,4/11,4/20
PER,Sandridge Permian Trust,18.06%,$2.88,$0.52,5/10,5/26
CHKR,Chesapeake Granite Wash Trust,16.75%,$2.40,$0.40,5/18,6/1
NAT,Nordic American Tankers,13.33%,$6.00,$0.80,5/18,6/8
WIN,Windstream Corp,13.22%,$4.54,$0.60,6/28,7/17
NYMT,New York Mortgage Trust Inc,12.14%,$6.59,$0.80,6/22,7/25
IEP,Icahn Enterprises L.P.,11.65%,$51.50,$6.00,5/11,6/14
FTR,Frontier Communications,11.51%,$1.39,$0.16,6/13,6/30