How to use BeautifulSoup to scrape table links from reddit

Question

I'm trying to scrape links from a Reddit table by using Beautiful Soup, and can successfully extract all of the table's contents except for the URLs. I am using item.find_all('a') but it's returning an empty list when using this code:

import praw
import csv
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def Authorize():
    """Authorizes Reddit API"""
    reddit = praw.Reddit(client_id='',
                     client_secret='',
                     username='',
                     password='',
                     user_agent='user')

url = 'https://old.reddit.com/r/formattesting/comments/94nc49/will_it_work/'
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
page = requests.get(url, headers=headers)

soup = BeautifulSoup(page.text, 'html.parser')

table_extract = soup.find_all('table')[0]
table_extract_items = table_extract.find_all('a')

for item in table_extract_items:
    letter_name = item.contents[0]
    links = item.find_all('a')
    print(letter_name)
    print(links)

This is what it returns:

6GB EVGA GTX 980 TI
[]
Intel i7-4790K
[]
Asus Z97-K Motherboard
[]
2x8 HyperX Fury DDR3 RAM
[]
Elagto HD 60 Pro Capture Card
[]

I would like for there to be the URL where the empty list is below each table row.

I am not sure if this makes a difference in the construct, but the end goal is to extract all of the table contents and links (keeping the association between the two) and save to a CSV as two columns. But for now I am just trying to print to keep it simple.

Answer 1

You were almost near. Your table_extract_items are HTML anchors from which you need to extract text – the content and attribute href using [ ] operators. I guess the inappropriate choice of variables name confused you. The line inside for-loop links = item.find_all('a') is wrong!

Here is my solution:

for anchor in table.findAll('a'):
    # if not anchor: finaAll returns empty list, .find() return None
    #    continue
    href = anchor['href']    
    print (href)
    print (anchor.text)

table in my code is what you named table_extract in your code

check this:

In [40]: for anchor in table.findAll('a'):
        # if not anchor:
        #        continue
        href = anchor['href']
        text = anchor.text
        print (href, "--", text)
   ....:     
https://imgur.com/a/Y1WlDiK -- 6GB EVGA GTX 980 TI
https://imgur.com/gallery/yxkPF3g -- Intel i7-4790K
https://imgur.com/gallery/nUKnya3 -- Asus Z97-K Motherboard
https://imgur.com/gallery/9YIU19P -- 2x8 HyperX Fury DDR3 RAM
https://imgur.com/gallery/pNqXC2z -- Elagto HD 60 Pro Capture Card
https://imgur.com/gallery/5K3bqMp -- Samsung EVO 250 GB SSD
https://imgur.com/FO8JoQO -- Corsair Scimtar MMO Mouse
https://imgur.com/C8PFsX0 -- Corsair K70 RGB Rapidfire Keyboard
https://imgur.com/hfCEzMA -- I messed up