How to Get a line of text from html to Python

Question

Im creating a program that prints out the Ip adress of the User. So what im trying to do is to get the Html of ipchicken.com and print out only the "Name Address" Part. here is my code so far:

import urllib              
sock = urllib.urlopen("http://ipchicken.com")
htmlSource = sock.read()           
sock.close()
print htmlSource

Now how do i get the ip part of the html printed out?

and if there are other ways to get an ip of the user using python,please include that aswell :)

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 03 '11 at 10:56

2

Use a HTML scraping library, like BeautifulSoup.

edited May 03 '11 at 10:56

Noufal Ibrahim

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answered May 03 '11 at 10:53

Eli Bendersky

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 03 '11 at 10:54

2

I would suggest that you use something that's more programmatic like ifconfig.me rather than ipchicken which is ad laden. ifconfig.me behaves different when being queried by something like cURL.

If you want to parse the HTML and get out the IP address with ipchicken, use BeautifulSoup or ElementTree.

update : http://ip.appspot.com/ is something that has only a programmatic interface.

answered May 03 '11 at 10:54

Noufal Ibrahim

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Yes, I Used That Link for the code instead of ipchicken now xD thanks! – May 03 '11 at 13:37

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 03 '11 at 10:54

2

Just run a regex to find IP structure patterns over htmlSource

ips = re.findall('(?:[\d]{1,3})\.(?:[\d]{1,3})\.(?:[\d]{1,3})\.(?:[\d]{1,3})',
                 htmlSource)

the variable ips will contain all literals with a IP structure.

The whole code would look like:

import urllib,re           
sock = urllib.urlopen("http://ipchicken.com")
htmlSource = sock.read()           
sock.close()
print htmlSource
ips = re.findall('(?:[\d]{1,3})\.(?:[\d]{1,3})\.(?:[\d]{1,3})\.(?:[\d]{1,3})', htmlSource)
print "IPs in page", ips

answered May 03 '11 at 10:54

Manuel Salvadores

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Screen scraping... and that too with regexps. I don't really recommend it. – Noufal Ibrahim May 03 '11 at 11:00
Thanks! That was huge help! plus i learned something new xD. Thanks! – May 03 '11 at 11:03
It seems trivial to solve this with a regex. Other solution like parsing the all the XML or using BeautifulSoup seems an overkill to me, just a matter of colours ... I guess :) – Manuel Salvadores May 03 '11 at 11:06
1

Switching to something that gives you programmatic output rather than something meant for human consumption is the "right way" in my opinion. – Noufal Ibrahim May 03 '11 at 13:01
Yes, I totally agree. But I don't think that was the question here. – Manuel Salvadores May 03 '11 at 13:25
The question carried some bad smells that needed fixing. – Noufal Ibrahim May 03 '11 at 14:16
I agree as well. But evangelizing about best approaches in every question would be quite imposible to sustain in SO. Every question would be endless. – Manuel Salvadores May 03 '11 at 14:25

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered May 03 '11 at 10:54

1

You can use a regular expression to grab a text within another text. If you provide the relevant part of your htmlSource we can post one.

Here are some posts on retrieving the IP address: How to find out your IP address in Python

answered May 03 '11 at 10:54

Don

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"to grab a text within another text.", yes. [It's probably not the right tool for HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454), though. – johnsyweb May 03 '11 at 11:03

How to Get a line of text from html to Python

4 Answers4