retrieve links from web page using python and BeautifulSoup

Here's a short snippet using the SoupStrainer class in BeautifulSoup:

import httplib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, SoupStrainer

http = httplib2.Http()
status, response = http.request('http://www.nytimes.com')

for link in BeautifulSoup(response, parse_only=SoupStrainer('a')):
    if link.has_attr('href'):
        print(link['href'])

The BeautifulSoup documentation is actually quite good, and covers a number of typical scenarios:

https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/

Edit: Note that I used the SoupStrainer class because it's a bit more efficient (memory and speed wise), if you know what you're parsing in advance.

Others have recommended BeautifulSoup, but it's much better to use lxml. Despite its name, it is also for parsing and scraping HTML. It's much, much faster than BeautifulSoup, and it even handles "broken" HTML better than BeautifulSoup (their claim to fame). It has a compatibility API for BeautifulSoup too if you don't want to learn the lxml API.

Ian Blicking agrees.

There's no reason to use BeautifulSoup anymore, unless you're on Google App Engine or something where anything not purely Python isn't allowed.

lxml.html also supports CSS3 selectors so this sort of thing is trivial.

An example with lxml and xpath would look like this:

import urllib
import lxml.html
connection = urllib.urlopen('http://www.nytimes.com')

dom =  lxml.html.fromstring(connection.read())

for link in dom.xpath('//a/@href'): # select the url in href for all a tags(links)
    print link

import urllib2
import BeautifulSoup

request = urllib2.Request("http://www.gpsbasecamp.com/national-parks")
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(response)
for a in soup.findAll('a'):
  if 'national-park' in a['href']:
    print 'found a url with national-park in the link'

Links can be within a variety of attributes so you could pass a list of those attributes to select.

For example, with src and href attributes (here I am using the starts with ^ operator to specify that either of these attributes values starts with http):

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
import requests
r = requests.get('https://stackoverflow.com/')
soup = bs(r.content, 'lxml')
links = [item['href'] if item.get('href') is not None else item['src'] for item in soup.select('[href^="http"], [src^="http"]') ]
print(links)

Attribute = value selectors

[attr^=value]

Represents elements with an attribute name of attr whose value is prefixed (preceded) by value.

There are also the commonly used $ (ends with) and * (contains) operators. For a full syntax list see the link above.

just for getting the links, without B.soup and regex:

import urllib2
url="http://www.somewhere.com"
page=urllib2.urlopen(url)
data=page.read().split("</a>")
tag="<a href=\""
endtag="\">"
for item in data:
    if "<a href" in item:
        try:
            ind = item.index(tag)
            item=item[ind+len(tag):]
            end=item.index(endtag)
        except: pass
        else:
            print item[:end]

for more complex operations, of course BSoup is still preferred.

There can be many duplicate links together with both external and internal links. To differentiate between the two and just get unique links using sets:

# Python 3.
import urllib    
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://www.espncricinfo.com/"
resp = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
# Get server encoding per recommendation of Martijn Pieters.
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp, from_encoding=resp.info().get_param('charset'))  
external_links = set()
internal_links = set()
for line in soup.find_all('a'):
    link = line.get('href')
    if not link:
        continue
    if link.startswith('http'):
        external_links.add(link)
    else:
        internal_links.add(link)

# Depending on usage, full internal links may be preferred.
full_internal_links = {
    urllib.parse.urljoin(url, internal_link) 
    for internal_link in internal_links
}

# Print all unique external and full internal links.
for link in external_links.union(full_internal_links):
    print(link)