Parsing a website and getting the info I need

Question

hi so I need to retrieve the url for the first article on a term I search up on nytimes.com

So if I search for Apple. This link would return the result

http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=Apple&srchst=cse

And you just replace Apple with the term you are searching for.

If you click on that link you would see that NYtimes ask you if you mean Apple Inc.

I want to get the url for this link, and go to it.

Then you will just get a lot of information on Apple Inc.

If you scroll down you will see the articles related to Apple.

So what I ultimately want is the URL of the first article on this page.

So I really do not know how to go about this. Do I use Java, or what do I use? Any help would be greatly appreciated and I would put a bounty on this later, but I need the answer ASAP.

Thanks

EDIT: Can we do this in Java?

Answer 1

You can use Python with the standard urllib module to fetch the pages and the great HTML parser BeautifulSoup to obtain the information you need from the pages.

From the documentation of BeautifulSoup, here's sample code that fetches a web page and extracts some info from it:

import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

page = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.icc-ccs.org/prc/piracyreport.php")
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
for incident in soup('td', width="90%"):
    where, linebreak, what = incident.contents[:3]
    print where.strip()
    print what.strip()
    print

This this is a nice and detailed article on the topic.

Answer 2

You can do this in C# using the HTML Agility Pack, or using LINQ to XML if the site is valid XHTML. EDIT: It isn't valid XHTML; I checked.

The following (tested) code will get the URL of the first search result:

var doc = new HtmlWeb().Load(@"http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=Apple&srchst=cse");
var url = HtmlEntity.DeEntitize(doc.DocumentNode.Descendants("ul")
                                 .First(ul => ul.Attributes["class"] != null 
                                           && ul.Attributes["class"].Value == "results")
                                 .Descendants("a")
                                 .First()
                                 .Attributes["href"].Value);

Note that if their website changes, this code might stop working.

Answer 3

You certainly can do it in Java. Look at the HttpURLConnection class. Basically, you give it a URL, call the connect function, and you get back an input stream with the contents of the page, i.e. HTML text. You can then process that and parse out whatever information you want.

You're facing two challenges in the project you are describing. The first, and probably really the lesser challenge, is figuring out the mechanics of how to connect to a web page and get hold of the text within your program. The second and probably bigger challenge will be to figure out exactly how to extract the information you want from that text. I'm not clear on the details of your requirements, but you're going to have to sort through a ton of text to find what you're looking for. Without actually looking at the NY Times site at the momemnt, I'm sure it has all sorts of decorations like pretty pictures and the company logo and headlines and so on, and then there are going to be menus and advertisements and all sorts of stuff. I sincerely doubt that the NY Times or almost any other commercial web site is going to return a search page that includes nothing but a link to the article you are interested in. Somehow your program will have to figure out that the first link is to the "subscribe on line" page, the second is to an advertisement, the third is to customer service, the fourth and fifth are additional advertisements, the sixth is to the home page, etc etc until you finally get to the one you're actually interested in. How will you identify the interesting link? There are probably headings or formatting that make it recognizable to a human being, but you use a lot of intuition to screen out the clutter that can be difficult to reproduce in a program.

Good luck!