BeautifulSoup Grab Visible Webpage Text

Question

Basically, I want to use BeautifulSoup to grab strictly the visible text on a webpage. For instance, this webpage is my test case. And I mainly want to just get the

Answer 1

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from bs4.element import Comment
import urllib.request
import re
import ssl

def tag_visible(element):
    if element.parent.name in ['style', 'script', 'head', 'title', 'meta', '[document]']:
        return False
    if isinstance(element, Comment):
        return False
    if re.match(r"[\n]+",str(element)): return False
    return True
def text_from_html(url):
    body = urllib.request.urlopen(url,context=ssl._create_unverified_context()).read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(body ,"lxml")
    texts = soup.findAll(text=True)
    visible_texts = filter(tag_visible, texts)  
    text = u",".join(t.strip() for t in visible_texts)
    text = text.lstrip().rstrip()
    text = text.split(',')
    clean_text = ''
    for sen in text:
        if sen:
            sen = sen.rstrip().lstrip()
            clean_text += sen+','
    return clean_text
url = 'http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/us/21storm.html'
print(text_from_html(url))