Extract content of <script> with BeautifulSoup

Question

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.",

Asked By: sqya

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Source

Answer 1

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)

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']

Answered By: falsetru

Answer 2

From the documentation:

As of Beautiful Soup version 4.9.0, when lxml or html.parser are in use, the contents of <script>, <style>, and <template> tags are not considered to be ‘text’, since those tags are not part of the human-visible content of the page.

So basically the accepted answer from falsetru above is all good, but use .string instead of .text with newer versions of Beautiful Soup, or you’ll be puzzled as I was by .text always returning None for <script> tags.

Answered By: Andrew Richards

Answer 3

Thanks for the inspiration. I’ve been trying for hours how to do it. But let me tell you that since Python3 doesn’t work with urllib2 anymore, we must use the requests library instead urllib2. I just drop here the updated version. Enjoy 😉

import json
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = input('Enter url:')
html = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(html.text,'html.parser')

data = json.loads(soup.find('script', type='application/ld+json').text)
print(data['articleBody'])

Answered By: Santi Gil

Extract content of <script> with BeautifulSoup

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