Using BeautifulSoup & for loop to extract data

Question

I am having trouble returning all desired data from a portion of a web page using BeautifulSoup. When I run the below python, the for-loop only brings back the first record it finds, not the entire data set from the web page:

import requests  
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup  
r = requests.get('https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-action-on-coronavirus-covid-19.aspx')
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'html.parser')  
results = soup.find_all('tbody')
records = []  
for result in results:  
    state_name = result.find('td').text
    law_Name = result.find('a').text
    law_link = result.find('a').get('href')
    law_status = result.find('b').text
    law_descr = result.find('tr').text[16:-2]
    records.append((state_name, law_Name,law_link,law_status,law_descr))

Only one element populates in the records list, even though I am using a for loop to go through all of results object (which is a bs4.element.ResultSet):

[('Alabama',
  'SJR 40',
  'http://alisondb.legislature.state.al.us/ALISON/SearchableInstruments/2020RS/PrintFiles/SJR40-enr.pdf',
  'Eligible for Governor.',
  ' Urges individuals to fist bump rather than shake hands. Eligible for Governor')]

Any assistance to fix my code would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

You have one <tbody> tag in the source code so it will create a list of one element. And when you try to find the td it will take only the first found. I think you want a list of all <tr> in the tbody and to do that use soup.find_all('tbody')[0].find_all('tr') Btw, take care of the structure, some links don't have <b> . I think this can help you:

import requests  
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup  

r = requests.get('https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/state-action-on-coronavirus-covid-19.aspx')
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'html.parser')  
results = soup.find_all('tbody')[0].find_all('tr')
records = []
for result in results:  
    state_name = result.find('td').text
    if result.find('a'):
        law_Name = result.find('a').text
        law_link = result.find('a').get('href')
    else:
        law_Name = None
        law_link = None
    law_status = result.find('b').text if result.find('b') else None
    law_descr = result.find_all('td')[1].text[16:-2]
    records.append((state_name, law_Name,law_link,law_status,law_descr))