Wikipedia Data Scraping with Python

Question

I am trying to retrieve 3 columns (NFL Team, Player Name, College Team) from the following wikipedia page. I am new to python and have been trying to use beautifulsoup to get this done. I only need the columns that belong to QB's but I haven't even been able to get all the columns despite position. This is what I have so far and it outputs nothing and I'm not entirely sure why. I believe it is due to the a tags but I do not know what to change. Any help would be greatly appreciated.'

wiki = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_NFL_draft"
header = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'} #Needed to prevent 403 error on Wikipedia
req = urllib2.Request(wiki,headers=header)
page = urllib2.urlopen(req)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)

rnd = ""
pick = ""
NFL = ""
player = ""
pos = ""
college = ""
conf = ""
notes = ""

table = soup.find("table", { "class" : "wikitable sortable" })

#print table

#output = open('output.csv','w')

for row in table.findAll("tr"):
    cells = row.findAll("href")
    print "---"
    print cells.text
    print "---"
    #For each "tr", assign each "td" to a variable.
    #if len(cells) > 1:
        #NFL = cells[1].find(text=True)
        #player = cells[2].find(text = True)
        #pos = cells[3].find(text=True)
        #college = cells[4].find(text=True)
        #write_to_file = player + " " + NFL + " " + college + " " + pos
        #print write_to_file

    #output.write(write_to_file)

#output.close()

I know a lot of it is commented it out because I was trying to find where the breakdown was.

Answer 1

Here is what I would do:

• find the Player Selections paragraph
• get the next wikitable using find_next_sibling()
• find all tr tags inside
• for every row, find td an th tags and get the desired cells by index

Here is the code:

filter_position = 'QB'
player_selections = soup.find('span', id='Player_selections').parent
for row in player_selections.find_next_sibling('table', class_='wikitable').find_all('tr')[1:]:
    cells = row.find_all(['td', 'th'])

    try:
        nfl_team, name, position, college = cells[3].text, cells[4].text, cells[5].text, cells[6].text
    except IndexError:
        continue

    if position != filter_position:
        continue

    print nfl_team, name, position, college

And here is the output (only quarterbacks are filtered):

Atlanta Falcons Ryan, MattMatt Ryan† QB Boston College
Baltimore Ravens Flacco, JoeJoe Flacco QB Delaware
Green Bay Packers Brohm, BrianBrian Brohm QB Louisville
Miami Dolphins Henne, ChadChad Henne QB Michigan
New England Patriots O'Connell, KevinKevin O'Connell QB San Diego State
Minnesota Vikings Booty, John DavidJohn David Booty QB USC
Pittsburgh Steelers Dixon, DennisDennis Dixon QB Oregon
Tampa Bay Buccaneers Johnson, JoshJosh Johnson QB San Diego
New York Jets Ainge, ErikErik Ainge QB Tennessee
Washington Redskins Brennan, ColtColt Brennan QB Hawaiʻi
New York Giants Woodson, Andre'Andre' Woodson QB Kentucky
Green Bay Packers Flynn, MattMatt Flynn QB LSU
Houston Texans Brink, AlexAlex Brink QB Washington State