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pythonctexthtml

Grabbing text from a webpage

I would like to write a program that will find bus stop times and update my personal webpage accordingly.

If I were to do this manually I would

  1. Visit www.calgarytransit.com
  2. Enter a stop number. ie) 9510
  3. Click the button "next bus"

The results may look like the following:

10:16p Route 154
10:46p Route 154
11:32p Route 154

Once I've grabbed the time and routes then I will update my webpage accordingly.

I have no idea where to start. I know diddly squat about web programming but can write some C and Python. What are some topics/libraries I could look into?

Solution

  • Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for parsing web pages. Between it and urllib2 (urllib.request in Python 3) you should be able to figure out what you need.