Why is scrape not working?

[illfuuptn]

Idk why it is returning this: [' '] but it is and it makes no sense.


webpage=urlopen('http://www.sbrforum.com/betting-odds/ncaa-basketball/?date=20120102').read()
findTeamName= re.compile('"team-name".*>(.*)</span></div')
find_it = re.findall(findTeamName,webpage)
print find_it
[' ']


I've checked tutorials and the pages they scrape work fine when I do them. So what's up with this?

[illfuuptn]

sorry for no code tags but when I put them on it deletes stuff for some reason

[illfuuptn]

Can't post source code because sbr reads it. So I guess you can look for yourself if you want to double check

[illfuuptn]

any help appreciated

[Maverick22]

Whatever language that is... I don't know it. Sorry, that I am not able to help you

[illfuuptn]

Whatever language that is... I don't know it. Sorry, that I am not able to help you

That's quite alright Maverick. You've helped me many times in the past. It's python for the record.

[Blax0r]

Hey illfuuptn, I'm not very familiar with python, but I think you should try adding a question mark after the .* in your regular expression.

So it would look like this: findTeamName= re.compile('"team-name".*?>(.*?)). Also, you may need to put something after the (.*?), or risk saving ALL the text after team name.

The question mark makes the regular expression "not greedy"; http://www.regular-expressions.info/optional.html.

Hope this helps.

[EXhoosier10]

Idk why it is returning this: [' '] but it is and it makes no sense.


webpage=urlopen('http://www.sbrforum.com/betting-odds/ncaa-basketball/?date=20120102').read()
findTeamName= re.compile('"team-name".*>(.*)</span></div')
find_it = re.findall(findTeamName,webpage)
print find_it
[' ']


I've checked tutorials and the pages they scrape work fine when I do them. So what's up with this?

I've never used urllib before. I downloaded beautfiful soup 4 from the get-go. If you change your code to that (since I have no idea how urlopen works or how compile or findall work), I'll be glad to take a look.

Also, try attaching your code in a .txt file

[HUY]

Idk why it is returning this: [' '] but it is and it makes no sense.


webpage=urlopen('http://www.sbrforum.com/betting-odds/ncaa-basketball/?date=20120102').read()
findTeamName= re.compile('"team-name".*>(.*)</span></div')
find_it = re.findall(findTeamName,webpage)
print find_it
[' ']


I've checked tutorials and the pages they scrape work fine when I do them. So what's up with this?

Never parse HTML using hand-crafted regular expressions. You will go insane and the result will always be unreliable. Just use BeautifulSoup and save yourself the hassle.

[KennyRogers]

Is there an update to this? I'm not familiar with BeautifulSoup, I am more familiar with Scrapy.

[Spektre]

Is scraping SBR allowed?