How iterate links and access one on specific position?

Question

I am working on an assignment where I need to parse this using BeautifulSoup: http://python-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Fikret.html

Basically, I need to print the initial URL and find the URL at position 3, access that and find the link at position 3 on that page, etc-- this need to take please four times in total.

This is the code I have so far:

# http://www.py4e.com/code3/bs4.zip
# and unzip it in the same directory as this file

import urllib.request, urllib.parse, urllib.error
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import ssl

# Ignore SSL certificate errors
ctx = ssl.create_default_context()
ctx.check_hostname = False
ctx.verify_mode = ssl.CERT_NONE

#url = input('Enter - ')
url =  "http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Fikret.html"
timesToRepeat = '4'
positionInput = '3'
#timesToRepeat = input('Repeat how many times?: ')
#positionInput = input('Enter Position: ')
try:
    timesToRepeat = int(timesToRepeat)
    positionInput = int(positionInput)
except:
    print("please add an number")
    quit()

# Retrieve all of the anchor tags
totalCount = 0
currentRepetitionCount = 0

html = urllib.request.urlopen(url, context=ctx).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')
tags = soup('a')

#Leave this all alone ^^^^
print("Retrieving: ",url)
for i in range(timesToRepeat):
    html = urllib.request.urlopen(url, context=ctx).read()
    for tag in tags:
        currentRepetitionCount += 1

        if not totalCount >= timesToRepeat:
            if currentRepetitionCount == positionInput:
                #print("current",currentRepetitionCount)
                #print("total",totalCount)
                #print("Retrieving: ",url)
                currentRepetitionCount = 0
                totalCount +=1
                url = tag.get('href', None)

                print("Retrieving: ",url)

I'm getting this:

Retrieving:  http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Fikret.html
Retrieving:  http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Montgomery.html
Retrieving:  http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Anona.html
Retrieving:  http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Zoe.html
Retrieving:  http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Carmyle.html

But I SHOULD be getting is this:

Retrieving: http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Fikret.html
Retrieving: http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Montgomery.html
Retrieving: http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Mhairade.html
Retrieving: http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Butchi.html
Retrieving: http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Anayah.html

It seems like the link isn't changing, and is just finding the 3rd position on the initial link each time and I can not for the life of me seem to fix it.

Answer 1

Try to simplify your code getting focus in your question and on main issue. So for eg it do not need an additional check for if not totalCount >= timesToRepeat:

Example

Be aware that I added a +1 to the timesToRepeat while requesting also first url in the loop to avoid repetition.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

url = 'http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Fikret.html'
timesToRepeat = 4
positionInput = 3

for i in range(timesToRepeat+1):
    print(f'Retrieving: {url}')
    soup=BeautifulSoup(requests.get(url).text)
    tag = soup.select('a')[positionInput-1]
    url = tag.get('href')

Output

Retrieving: http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Fikret.html
Retrieving: http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Montgomery.html
Retrieving: http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Mhairade.html
Retrieving: http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Butchi.html
Retrieving: http://py4e-data.dr-chuck.net/known_by_Anayah.html