[FIXED] Using Python's BeautifiulSoup Library to Parse info in a Span HTML tag

Issue

I am writing a Python web scraper that grabs the price of a certain stock. At the end of my program, there are a few print statements to correctly parse the html data so I can grab the stock's price info within a certain HTML span tag. My question is: How do I do this? I have gotten so far as to get the correct HTML span tag. I thought you could simply do a string splice, however the price of the stock is subject to incessant change and I figure this solution would not be conducive for this problem. I recently started using BeautifulSoup, so a little advice would be much appreciated.

import bs4
from urllib.request import urlopen as uReq
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as soup

# webscraping reference http://altitudelabs.com/blog/web-scraping-with-python-and-beautiful-soup/

my_url = 'https://quotes.wsj.com/GRPS/options'
#opens up a web connection and "downloads"a copy of the desired webpage
uClient = uReq(my_url)

#dumps the information read on the webpade into a variable for later use/parsing
page_html = uClient.read()
uClient.close()

page_soup = soup(page_html, "lxml")

#find the html location for the price of the stock
#<span id="quote_val">0.0008</span>

all_stock_info = page_soup.find("section",{"class":"sector cr_section_1"})
find_spans = all_stock_info.find("span",{"id":"quote_val"})
price = page_soup.findAll("span",{"id":"quote_val"})

#sanity checks to make sure the scraper is finding the correct info
print(all_stock_info)
print(len(all_stock_info))
print(len(price))
print(price)  #this gives me the right span, I just need to be able to parse 
              #the price of the stock between here (in this case 0.0008) no 
              #matter what the price is
print(all_stock_info.span)
print(find_spans)


  

Solution

You can use .find with .text function to get your required value.

Ex:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
page_soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "lxml")
price = page_soup.find("span",{"id":"quote_val"}).text
print( price )

Output:

0.0008

Answered By - Rakesh