I have a script that uses bs4 to scrape a webpage and grab a string named, "Last Updated 4/3/2020, 8:28 p.m.". I then assign this string to a variable and send it in an email. The script is scheduled to run once a day. However, the date and time on the website change every other day. So, instead of emailing every time I run the script I'd like to set up a trigger so that it sends only when the date is different. How do I configure the script to detect that change?
String in HTML:
COVID-19 News Updates
Last Updated 4/3/2020, 12:08 p.m.
'''Checks municipal websites for changes in meal assistance during C19 pandemic'''
# Import requests (to download the page)
import requests
# Import BeautifulSoup (to parse what we download)
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re
#list of urls
urls = ['http://www.vofil.com/covid19_updates']
#set the headers as a browser
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'}
#download the homepage
response = requests.get(urls[0], headers=headers)
#parse the downloaded homepage and grab all text
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "lxml")
#Find string
last_update_fra = soup.findAll(string=re.compile("Last Updated"))
print(last_update_fra)
#Put something here (if else..?) to trigger an email.
#I left off email block...
The closet answer I found was this, but it's referring to the tags, not a string. Parsing changing tags BeautifulSoup