Can't figure how to web-scraping using beautifulsoup

Question

I am trying to scrape the info below from some web page. This is the full code:

<tr class="owner">
   <td id="P184" class="ownerP" colspan="4">
      <ul>
         <li><span class="detailType">name:</span><span class="detail">merry/span></li>
         <li><a title="sendmessage" class="sendMessageLink" onclick="return openSendMessage('/sendMessage.php',20205" href="" tabindex="0"><span></span>sendmessage</a>&nbsp;<span class="remark_soft">(by pm system)</span></li>
         <li><span class="detailType">phone 1</span><a class="detail" href="tel:0387362531">0387362531</a></li>
         <li><span class="detailType"></span></li>
      </ul>
   </td>
</tr>

I want to only get this info (the phone number):

 <a class="detail" href="tel:0387362531">0387362531</a> 

Here is my code, but it doesn't work:

 for details in soup.find_all(attrs= {"class": "detail"}):
    re_res = re.search(r"tel:\('.*?',(\d+)\)", details['href'])
    print(re_res)

Answer 1

You are pretty close, here you go:

import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html_doc = """
<tr class="owner"><td id="P184" class="ownerP" colspan="4"><ul>
            <li><span class="detailType">name:</span><span class="detail">merry/span></li>
            <li><a title="sendmessage" class="sendMessageLink" onclick="return openSendMessage('/sendMessage.php',20205" href="" tabindex="0"><span></span>sendmessage</a>&nbsp;<span class="remark_soft">(by pm system)</span></li><li><span class="detailType">phone 1</span><a class="detail" href="tel:0387362531">0387362531</a></li><li><span class="detailType"></span></li>
</ul></td></tr>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')

for details in soup.find_all(attrs= {"class": "detail"}):
    if "href" in details.attrs and re.search("^tel:", details.attrs["href"]):
        print(details.text)

Output:

0387362531

I'm simply looking through the details list you've made and if I find one that has and href and that href starts with tel: then print that value out.

Answer 2

You should replace soup.find_all(attrs= {"class": "detail"}) by soup.find_all('a', attrs= {"class": "detail"})[0] in order to avoid having the span too in details .

Moreover your regex does not work, this one should work tel:(\\d+) . But rather than using a regex why not just getting a tag text by doing details.text ?

Answer 3

You have to add the element type a to find_all and your regex tel:\\('.*?',(\\d+)\\) tries to match opening and closing parenthesis \\( and \\) which are not in the href .

You could update your regex to tel:(\\d+) to match tel: followed by one or more digits in a capturing group (group 1) which you can retrieve with re_res.group(1)

For example:

for details in soup.find_all('a', attrs= {"class": "detail"}):
    re_res = re.search(r"tel:(\d+)", details['href'])
    print(re_res.group(1))  # 0387362531

Answer 4

You can get the same result without using regex. In that case, try the below approach:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html_doc = """
<tr class="owner"><td id="P184" class="ownerP" colspan="4"><ul>
            <li><span class="detailType">name:</span><span class="detail">merry/span></li>
            <li><a title="sendmessage" class="sendMessageLink" onclick="return openSendMessage('/sendMessage.php',20205" href="" tabindex="0"><span></span>sendmessage</a>&nbsp;<span class="remark_soft">(by pm system)</span></li><li><span class="detailType">phone 1</span><a class="detail" href="tel:0387362531">0387362531</a></li><li><span class="detailType"></span></li>
</ul></td></tr>
"""

Using .select() :

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')
for telephone in soup.select("a[href^='tel:']"):
    if "detail" in telephone['class']:
        print(telephone.text)

Or with .find_all() :

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')
for telephone in soup.find_all("a",class_="detail"):
    if telephone['href'].startswith('tel:'):
        print(telephone.text)

They both produce the same output:

0387362531