Scraping Badly Coded Html

I scraped a website that has hundreds of pages of badly organized HTML. I used BeautifulSoup to capture all the content of a div on each page. The excerpt of that list is: mylist =

Solution 1:

Usually,when you use select on a BeatifulSoup object,you get a list of Tags. And you can use select/getText on the Tags again. For exsample:

SEP='(--*--SEP--*--)'
mylist=soup.select('div')
between_br=[[j for j in i.getText(SEP).split(SEP) ifnot j.isspace()] for i in mylist]

Solution 2:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
mylist = [['<div id="headingData">006951446<br/>Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC<br/>Critical notice<br/>12/30/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>12/31/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>92112<br/>Initiate<br/>Capacity Constraint<br/>12/29/2019<br/>03:02:38 PM<br/> <br/><br/>No response required<br/> <br/> <br/>AGT Pipeline Conditions for 12/30/2019<br/></div>'],
          ['<div id="headingData">006951446<br/>Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC<br/>Critical notice<br/>12/29/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>12/30/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>92086<br/>Initiate<br/>Capacity Constraint<br/>12/28/2019<br/>02:55:39 PM<br/> <br/><br/>No response required<br/> <br/> <br/>AGT Pipeline Conditions for 12/29/2019<br/></div>'],
          ['<div id="headingData">006951446<br/>Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC<br/>Critical notice<br/>12/28/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>12/29/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>92074<br/>Initiate<br/>Capacity Constraint<br/>12/27/2019<br/>03:14:16 PM<br/> <br/><br/>No response required<br/> <br/> <br/>AGT Pipeline Conditions for 12/28/2019<br/></div>']]

for item in mylist:
    soup = BeautifulSoup(*item, 'html.parser')
    print(*[a.get_text(strip=True, separator="|").split("|") for a in soup])

Output:

['006951446', 'Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC', 'Critical notice', '12/30/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '12/31/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '92112', 'Initiate', 'Capacity Constraint', '12/29/2019', '03:02:38 PM', 'No response required', 'AGT Pipeline Conditions for 
12/30/2019']
['006951446', 'Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC', 'Critical notice', '12/29/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '12/30/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '92086', 'Initiate', 'Capacity Constraint', '12/28/2019', '02:55:39 PM', 'No response required', 'AGT Pipeline Conditions for 
12/29/2019']
['006951446', 'Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC', 'Critical notice', '12/28/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '12/29/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '92074', 'Initiate', 'Capacity Constraint', '12/27/2019', '03:14:16 PM', 'No response required', 'AGT Pipeline Conditions for 
12/28/2019']

Solution 3:

Without seeing the rest of your code, it might be hard to give an exact answer but beautifulsoup is a great package for this. You should be able to continue using the bs4 package to comb through the HTML using a combination of BeautifulSoup methods.(e.g. find/find_all/select etc.)

See this answer for help on br tags

Solution 4:

Solutions using library SimplifiedDoc.

from simplified_scrapy import SimplifiedDoc,req,utils
mylist = [['<divid="headingData">006951446<br/>Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC<br/>Critical notice<br/>12/30/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>12/31/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>92112<br/>Initiate<br/>Capacity Constraint<br/>12/29/2019<br/>03:02:38 PM<br/><br/><br/>No response required<br/><br/><br/>AGT Pipeline Conditions for 12/30/2019<br/></div>'],
          ['<divid="headingData">006951446<br/>Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC<br/>Critical notice<br/>12/29/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>12/30/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>92086<br/>Initiate<br/>Capacity Constraint<br/>12/28/2019<br/>02:55:39 PM<br/><br/><br/>No response required<br/><br/><br/>AGT Pipeline Conditions for 12/29/2019<br/></div>'],
          ['<divid="headingData">006951446<br/>Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC<br/>Critical notice<br/>12/28/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>12/29/2019<br/>09:00:00 AM<br/>92074<br/>Initiate<br/>Capacity Constraint<br/>12/27/2019<br/>03:14:16 PM<br/><br/><br/>No response required<br/><br/><br/>AGT Pipeline Conditions for 12/28/2019<br/></div>']]
values = []
# First way
for item in mylist:
  doc = SimplifiedDoc(item[0])
  tmp = doc.selects('br').nextText()
  tmp.insert(0,doc.div.firstText())
  values.append(tmp)
values = []
# Second way
for item in mylist:
  doc = SimplifiedDoc(item[0])
  brs = doc.selects('br')
  tmp = [br.previousText() for br in brs]
  values.append(tmp)
print(values)

Result:

[['006951446', 'Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC', 'Critical notice', '12/30/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '12/31/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '92112', 'Initiate', 'Capacity Constraint', '12/29/2019', '03:02:38 PM', '', '', 'No response required', '', '', 'AGT Pipeline Conditions for 12/30/2019'], ['006951446', 'Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC', 'Critical notice', '12/29/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '12/30/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '92086', 'Initiate', 'Capacity Constraint', '12/28/2019', '02:55:39 PM', '', '', 'No response required', '', '', 'AGT Pipeline Conditions for 12/29/2019'], ['006951446', 'Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC', 'Critical notice', '12/28/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '12/29/2019', '09:00:00 AM', '92074', 'Initiate', 'Capacity Constraint', '12/27/2019', '03:14:16 PM', '', '', 'No response required', '', '', 'AGT Pipeline Conditions for 12/28/2019']]