Scrape variable inside CData with BeautifulSoup

Question

I have a webpage with the following data that I would like to scrape in the CData section of that webpage.

<script type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[ 

car.app =


{"lat":26.175625,"lon":-80.13808,"zoom":"13","yellow":"\/img\/icons\/yellow.png","cars":[{"CAR_ID":"715383","ID":"538070521","UID":"0","CARNAME":"MAZDA","TYPE_COLOR":"0","LAT":"26.13437","LON":"-80.11906","COURSE":"100","SPEED":"0","LENGTH":"12","STATE":"OH"}] 

... 
... 
//]]></script>

I would like to grab the car.app variable inside of the CData, but I am unsure how to parse that in python.

import bs4 as bs

import urllib.request

class AppURLopener(urllib.request.FancyURLopener):
    version = "Mozilla/5.0"

opener = AppURLopener()
response = opener.open(url)

c = response.read()
soup = bs.BeautifulSoup(c, "html.parser")
print(soup)

Answer 1

I think the only way to solve your problem is to parse that specific tag using BeautifulSoup and then do some string manipulation to achieve your goal.

Code:

import bs4 as bs
import urllib.request

c = '''
<script type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[ 

car.app =


{"lat":26.175625,"lon":-80.13808,"zoom":"13","yellow":"\/img\/icons\/yellow.png","cars":[{"CAR_ID":"715383","ID":"538070521","UID":"0","CARNAME":"MAZDA","TYPE_COLOR":"0","LAT":"26.13437","LON":"-80.11906","COURSE":"100","SPEED":"0","LENGTH":"12","STATE":"OH"}] 

... 
... 
//]]></script>
'''
soup = bs.BeautifulSoup(c, "html.parser")
script = soup.find('script')
print(str(script.text).split('car.app =')[1].split('...')[0].replace('\n', ''))

Output:

{"lat":26.175625,"lon":-80.13808,"zoom":"13","yellow":"\/img\/icons\/yellow.png","cars":[{"CAR_ID":"715383","ID":"538070521","UID":"0","CARNAME":"MAZDA","TYPE_COLOR":"0","LAT":"26.13437","LON":"-80.11906","COURSE":"100","SPEED":"0","LENGTH":"12","STATE":"OH"}]