How can I scrape an HTML table to CSV?

Question

The Problem

I use a tool at work that lets me do queries and get back HTML tables of info. I do not have any kind of back-end access to it.

A lot of this inf

Answer 1

This is my python version using the (currently) latest version of BeautifulSoup which can be obtained using, e.g.,

$ sudo easy_install beautifulsoup4

The script reads HTML from the standard input, and outputs the text found in all tables in proper CSV format.

#!/usr/bin/python
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import sys
import re
import csv

def cell_text(cell):
    return " ".join(cell.stripped_strings)

soup = BeautifulSoup(sys.stdin.read())
output = csv.writer(sys.stdout)

for table in soup.find_all('table'):
    for row in table.find_all('tr'):
        col = map(cell_text, row.find_all(re.compile('t[dh]')))
        output.writerow(col)
    output.writerow([])