[FIXED] Split text at specific character in BeautifulSoup

Issue

I am brand new to Python and BeautifulSoup so please forgive the lack of proper vocabulary in my question.

I am trying to extract the list from this webpage: http://spajournalism.com/membership/ - I want all the publications that are asssociated with a specific university. I'd like to end up with a list of dictionaries like: [{publication_url: url1, publication_name: name1, uni: uni1}, {publication_url: url2, publication_name: name2, uni: uni2}]

Unfortunately the content on the webpage is quite messy, HTML-wise and it's proving tricky. My code is currently:

import lxml.etree
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://spajournalism.com/membership/"
page = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.content, "lxml")

section = soup.find("div", "entry-content clearfix")
links = section.find_all("a")

#list = []

#for link in links:
#    publication = {
#        "Link" : link.get("href"),
#        "Publication" : link.parent.text
#    }

for link in links:
    print("Link: ", link.get("href"), "Text: ", link.parent.text)

This returns a list of the following nature:

Link:  http://www.swanseastudentmedia.com/waterfront/ Text:  The Waterfront – Swansea University
Link:  https://www.seren.bangor.ac.uk/ Text:  Y Seren – Bangor University
...etc

I would like to, instead of getting all the text in one go with link.parent.text, split it at the hyphen ( – ), and get something more like:

Link:  http://www.swanseastudentmedia.com/waterfront/ Text:  The Waterfront University: Swansea University
Link:  https://www.seren.bangor.ac.uk/ Text:  Y Seren University: Bangor University
...etc

I have tried something like the following:

for link in links:
    text = link.parent.text
    linktext = link.string
    text.replace(linktext, " ") # Replace the redundant link text with nothing

    print("Link: ", link.get("href"), "Publication: ", linktext, "University: ", text)

But the replacing the redundant text with nothing doesn't seem to work because what I get is:

Link:  http://www.swanseastudentmedia.com/waterfront/ Publication:  The Waterfront University:  The Waterfront – Swansea University
Link:  https://www.seren.bangor.ac.uk/ Publication:  Y Seren University:  Y Seren – Bangor University
...etc

Is there a way of doing this? Any searches I do are full of results referring to something called Dash which isn't relevant to me. Thanks :)

Solution

replace() function dont change the text_variable, it returns a new string

Change

text.replace(linktext, " ")

To

text = text.replace(linktext, " ").split("–", 1)[-1].strip()

Answered By - Wonka