Scraping links using bs4 and python

Question

I am looking to parse links out of a website using bs4. I was trying to avoid using regex.

def generate_url(day, year, month):
   url = f"http://hockey-reference.com/boxscores/?year={year}&month={month}&day={day}"
   page = requests.get(url)
   soup = BeautifulSoup(page.content, 'lxml')
   return soup

soup = generate_url(13,2021,1)
html_links = soup.find_all('td', class_ = 'right gamelink')

My result is a list with the html embedded...

[<td class="right gamelink">
<a href="/boxscores/202101130COL.html">F<span class="no_mobile">inal</span></a>
</td>,
<td class="right gamelink">
<a href="/boxscores/202101130EDM.html">F<span class="no_mobile">inal</span></a>
</td>,
<td class="right gamelink">
<a href="/boxscores/202101130PHI.html">F<span class="no_mobile">inal</span></a>
</td>,
<td class="right gamelink">
<a href="/boxscores/202101130TBL.html">F<span class="no_mobile">inal</span></a>
</td>,
<td class="right gamelink">
<a href="/boxscores/202101130TOR.html">F<span class="no_mobile">inal</span></a>
</td>]

What are the best ways to extract these links?

Answer 1

Append your code with iterating through html_links and getting href from them:

url = 'http://hockey-reference.com'
for html_link in html_links:
    link = html_link.findChild('a')['href']
    print(url + link)

Answer 2

If you only want to get links containing "boxscores" use this:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
import re

a = requests.get("https://www.hockey-reference.com/boxscores/?year=2021&month=1&day=13")
soup = BeautifulSoup(a.text, features="html.parser")

for link in soup.find_all('a', attrs={'href': re.compile("boxscores")}):
    print(link['href'])

Output:

There are a lot of empty links, if you only want the ones what say /boxscores/2021, just simply change the re.compile to "boxscores/2021".

This uses the re module to find "boxscores" in the link, so be sure to import re .

Furthermore, if you wish to get all links from the webpage, use this:

for link in soup.find_all('a', href=True):
    print(link['href'])