Terminal won't show print response using BeautifulSoup

Question

Here is my code:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

page = requests.get('https://web.archive.org/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/collection/anZ1.htm')
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.text, 'html.parser')

name_list = soup.find(class_='BodyText')
name_list_item = name_list.find_all('a')

for i in name_list_item:
  names = name_list.contents[0]
  print(names)

Then I ran it but nothing showed up in terminal except for a blank space like this:

Please help!! :<

Answer 1

the problem is in the for loop, you have to exctract content from i and not from name_list_item.

your working code should look like this:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

page = requests.get('https://web.archive.org/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/collection/anZ1.htm')
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.text, 'html.parser')

name_list = soup.find(class_='BodyText')
name_list_item = name_list.find_all('a')

for i in name_list_item:
  names = i.contents[0]
  print(names)

Answer 2

I will suggest you to use the below approach to get the links. (Actually the problem with your appraoch is that it also includes invalid data that we don't want, you can print and check). There are 32 names of type <class 'bs4.element.NavigableString'> which does not have contents, so it is printing 32 LF (ASCII value 10) characters.

Useful links »

• How to find tags with only certain attributes - BeautifulSoup

• How to find children of nodes using Beautiful Soup

• Python: BeautifulSoup extract text from anchor tag

>>> import requests
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>>
>>> page = requests.get('https://web.archive.org/web/20121007172955/https://www
.nga.gov/collection/anZ1.htm')
>>>
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(page.text, 'html.parser')
>>> name_list = soup.findAll("tr", {"valign": "top"})
>>>
>>> for name in name_list:
...     print(name.find("a")["href"])
...
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=11630
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=34202
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=3475
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=25135
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=2298
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=23988
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=8232
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=34154
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=4910
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=3450
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=1986
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=3451
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=20099
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=3452
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=34309
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=27191
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=5846
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=3941
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=3941
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=3453
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=35173
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=11133
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=3455
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=3454
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=961
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=11597
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=11597
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=11631
/web/20121007172955/https://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/tsearch?artistid=3427
>>>

Thank you.