Extracting a Link

Applying the same methodology for extracting a hextet, we can extract the url from an html anchor tag. The steps can be enumerated:

• use find() to identify the index location of the first tag on the page - using as an argument to find() the string <a href=

• by the same method, find the quote " mark’s index position

• then the second quote mark

• extract the url from between those two quote marks.

Using a snippet of a web page, try it by launching 🚀 this notebook

# our data
page = """
    <h1>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.</h1>
    <ul>
      <li>
        <a href="https://brave.com">Search</a>
      </li>
      <li><a href="https://docs.python.org/3">Python docs</a></li>
    </ul>
"""

# find the first import index value
start_link = page.find("<a href=")
# find first quotation mark
start_quote = page.find('"', start_link)
# find second quotation mark 
# to find the final quote enclosing the url we increment the start_quote index value
end_quote = page.find('"', start_quote + 1)
# now we use string slicing for extraction
url = page[start_quote + 1: end_quote]