How to I make the result of this a variable?

Question

right now its set up to write to a file, but I want it to output the value to a variable. not sure how.

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import sys, re, urllib2
import codecs


woof1 = urllib2.urlopen('someurl').read()
woof_1 = BeautifulSoup(woof1)
woof2 = urllib2.urlopen('someurl').read()
woof_2 = BeautifulSoup(woof2)

GE_DB = open('GE_DB.txt', 'a')

for row in woof_1.findAll("tr", { "class" : "row_b" }):
  for col in row.findAll(re.compile('td')):
    GE_DB.write(col.string if col.string else '')
GE_DB.write("   ")
GE_DB.write("\n")
GE_DB.close()
for row in woof_2.findAll("tr", { "class" : "row_b" }):
  for col in row.findAll(re.compile('td')):
    GE_DB.write(col.string if col.string else '')
GE_DB.write("\n")
GE_DB.close()

Answer 1

values = []
for row in woof_1.findAll("tr", { "class" : "row_b" }):
  for col in row.findAll(re.compile('td')):
    if col.string:
      values.append(col.string)
result = ''.join(values)

Answer 2

import cStringIO as StringIO   # or import StringIO if on a fringe platform
buf = StringIO.StringIO()
for row in woof_1.findAll("tr", { "class" : "row_b" }):
  for col in row.findAll(re.compile('td')):
    buf.write(col.string if col.string else '')

result = buf.getvalue()

Answer 3

Get rid of all mentions of GE_DB.

Do a outputtext = "" towards the beginning.

Replace GE_DB.write(col.string if col.string else '') with outputtext += col.string if col.string else ''