web scraping - Find or select elements from python to scrape with beautifulsoup

Question

I am not sure how to select below items inside the table class="table-info"

Using python and beautifulsoup, I want to extract the:

1. phone

2. email

3. website

4. main activity (li element text without the div) "Computer consultancy activities".

    <table class="table-info">
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">Business name</div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text">Company XYZ</div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">Register code:</div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text">112233558</div>
            </td>
        </tr>
   
   
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">Operating address:</div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text"><a target="googlemaps" href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/Some-location"
                        class="link-location">Some location strt. 233</a></div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">Legal address</div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text">
                    <a class="link-location" href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/Some-location" target="_new">Some
                        location
                    </a>
                </div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">VAT No:</div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="return getVAT(this, '12345678')">Get VAT
                        liability</a></div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">Age:</div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text">1 year&nbsp;3 months</div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">Founded:</div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text">20/09/2019</div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">Capital:</div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text">2000 USD</div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td colspan="2" class="sep"></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">Phone:</div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text">123456789</div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">E-mail:</div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text"><a href="mailto:some@one.com">some@one.com</a></div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td colspan="2" class="sep"></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">Representatives:</div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text">
                    <div class="box-message">
                        <p class="desc">To access information, please</p>
                        <p>
                            <a href="#" onclick="return loginClicked(this, '#');"
                                class="btn btn-small btn-purple link-login">Log in</a>
                        </p>
                    </div>
                </div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td colspan="2" class="sep"></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="col-1">
                <div class="col-1-text">
                    Main activity:
                    <span class="tip info" title=""
                        data-original-title="Activities are classified according to EMTAK 2008"></span>
                </div>
            </td>
            <td class="col-2">
                <div class="col-2-text" id="activity_top5ffe2eab23d13">
                    <ul>
                        <li>
                            Computer consultancy activities
                            <div class="main_activities_top_link_wrapper">
                                <a href="https://www.somesite.com/" target="_blank"
                                    onclick="ga('send', 'event', 'check', 'top_btn', 'Anonym');"
                                    class="btn btn-simple btn-open-graph">
                                    <span>Open TOP 20</span> </a>
                            </div>
                        </li>
                    </ul>
   
                </div>
            </td>
        </tr>
   
   
    </tbody>
   

Note: Above code is one query result / html example, but sometimes query result / company does not have email or website / vice versa. So, its important that code does not run into error if it does not find the html content what its looking for. I find its better to follow the class names or ids rather than counting how deep the table/div nesting goes (xpath).

I have code which is not working great atm:

import csv
import requests
import datetime
import time
 
from requests import get
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
 
 
with open('data.csv', encoding='utf8') as csvfile:
    reader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=';')
    next(reader)
 
    count = 0
     
    for row in reader:
         
        timestamp = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
 
        url = f'https://www.somedomain.com/result?country=en&q={row[1]}'
         
        headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36'}
        cookies = {'__test': '1bb6e881021f013463740eeb74840b18'}
        content = get(url, headers=headers,  cookies=cookies).content
        soup = BeautifulSoup(content, "lxml")
 
        table_info = soup.select_one('.table-info')
 
        mail = table_info.select_one('.col-2 a[href^=mailto]')
        mail = mail.get('href')
        mail_clean = mail.split(':')[1]
 
        website = soup.find(text='Website:')
        website = table_info.select_one('.col-2 a[target^=_blank]')
        website = website.get('href') 
         
        collected_data = row[1], mail_clean, website, timestamp
 
        data_list = [["Regcode", "Email", "Website", "Timestamp"],collected_data]
        with open('extracted.csv', 'w', newline='') as file:
            writer = csv.writer(file, delimiter=';')
            writer.writerows(data_list)
 
        print(row[1], "|", mail_clean,"|", website,"|", timestamp)
        #print("Waiting 3 seconds...")
        #time.sleep(3)
        count+=1
     
  

Answer 1

Have you considered using css selectors that count the table's children? If your table will always mirror the example code, it just might be easier to use the nth-child property.

• Phone: tr:nth-child(10) .col-2-text
• Email: tr:nth-child(11) a
• Website: span
• Main Activity: li

I used Selector Gadget to grab these tags. You might want to run it on your page directly to see if there are any other ones that are easier to implement.