Getting Different Results For Web Scraping

I was trying to do web scraping and was using the following code :

import mechanize
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = "http://www.thehindu.com/archive/web/2010/06/19/"

br =  mechanize.Browser()
htmltext = br.open(url).read()

link_dictionary = {}
soup = BeautifulSoup(htmltext)

for tag_li in soup.findAll('li', attrs={"data-section":"Chennai"}):
    for link in tag_li.findAll('a'):
        link_dictionary[link.string] = link.get('href')
        print link_dictionary[link.string]
        urlnew = link_dictionary[link.string]

        brnew =  mechanize.Browser()
        htmltextnew = brnew.open(urlnew).read()

        articletext = ""
        soupnew = BeautifulSoup(htmltextnew)
        for tag in soupnew.findAll('p'):
            articletext += tag.text

        print articletext

I was unable to get any printed values by using this. But on using attrs={"data-section":"Business"} instead of attrs={"data-section":"Chennai"} I was able to get the desired output. Can someone help me?


READ THE TERMS OF SERVICES OF THE WEBSITE BEFORE SCRAPING

If you are using firebug or inspect element in Chrome, you might see some contents that will not be seen if you are using Mechanize or Urllib2.

For example, when you view the source code of the page sent out by you. (Right click view source in Chrome). and search for data-section tag, you won't see any tags which chennai, I am not 100% sure but I will say those contents need to be populated by Javascript ..etc. which requires the functionality of a browser.

If I were you, I will use selenium to open up the page and then get the source page from there, then the HTML collected in that way will be more like what you see in a browser.

Cited here

from selenium import webdriver
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import time   

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("URL GOES HERE")
# I noticed there is an ad here, sleep til page fully loaded.
time.sleep(10)

soup = BeautifulSoup(driver.page_source)
print len(soup.findAll(...}))
# or you can work directly in selenium     
...

driver.close()

And the output for me is 8

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19918153/getting-different-results-for-web-scraping