pythonpython-2.7beautifulsoup

Extract content of <script> with BeautifulSoup


1/ I am trying to extract a part of the script using beautiful soup but it prints Nothing. What's wrong ?

URL = "http://www.reuters.com/video/2014/08/30/woman-who-drank-restaurants-tainted-tea?videoId=341712453"
oururl= urllib2.urlopen(URL).read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(oururl)

for script in soup("script"):
        script.extract()

list_of_scripts = soup.findAll("script")
print list_of_scripts

2/ The goal is to extract the value of the attribute "transcript":

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
    "@context": "http://schema.org",
    "@type": "VideoObject",
    "video": {
        "@type": "VideoObject",
        "headline": "Woman who drank restaurant&#039;s tainted tea hopes for industry...",
        "caption": "Woman who drank restaurant&#039;s tainted tea hopes for industry...",  
        "transcript": "Jan Harding is speaking out for the first time about the ordeal that changed her life.               SOUNDBITE: JAN HARDING, DRANK TAINTED TEA, SAYING:               \"Immediately my whole mouth was on fire.\"               The Utah woman was critically burned in her mouth and esophagus after taking a sip of sweet tea laced with a toxic cleaning solution at Dickey's BBQ.               SOUNDBITE: JAN HARDING, DRANK TAINTED TEA, SAYING:               \"It was like a fire beyond anything you can imagine. I mean, it was not like drinking hot coffee.\"               Authorities say an employee mistakenly mixed the industrial cleaning solution containing lye into the tea thinking it was sugar.               The Hardings hope the incident will bring changes in the restaurant industry to avoid such dangerous mixups.               SOUNDBITE: JIM HARDING, HUSBAND, SAYING:               \"Bottom line, so no one ever has to go through this again.\"               The district attorney's office is expected to decide in the coming week whether criminal charges will be filed.",

Solution

  • extract remove tag from the dom. That's why you get empty list.


    Find script with the type="application/ld+json" attribute and decode it using json.loads. Then, you can access the data like Python data structure. (dict for the given data)

    for Python 2.x:

    import json
    import urllib2
    
    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
    
    URL = ("http://www.reuters.com/video/2014/08/30/"
            "woman-who-drank-restaurants-tainted-tea?videoId=341712453")
    oururl= urllib2.urlopen(URL).read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(oururl)
    
    data = json.loads(soup.find('script', type='application/ld+json').text)
    print data['video']['transcript']
    

    UPDATE: for Python 3.x:

    import json
    import urllib.request
    
    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
    
    URL = ("http://www.reuters.com/video/2014/08/30/"
           "woman-who-drank-restaurants-tainted-tea?videoId=341712453")
    oururl= urllib.request.urlopen(URL).read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(oururl)
    
    data = json.loads(soup.find('script', type='application/ld+json').text)
    print(data['video']['transcript'])